Learning Archives - Samantha Mosher

How Shakespeare Helped Me Get My Groove Back

This school year brought a lot of new responsibilities and a lot of changes to my position. I was sharing a room. I was doing more math intervention, which is an interesting challenge, but definitely isn’t my strength. I was teaching a pull-out intervention class to 5th graders. Fifth graders are cute, but definitely not my favorite grade. I felt like I wasn’t making progress with any of my students. I could feel myself slipping into a pattern with my math interventions where I would learn about new strategies for math intervention, try them once or twice, and then slip back into what I was used to (yes, I am absolutely a Conscious Stage teacher when it comes to math intervention). I knew it was happening, but felt powerless to stop the cycle. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out the best way to manage the behaviors of my 5th graders–all of whom had different needs, both academically and social-emotionally–and it was definitely making it difficult to deliver appropriate interventions. They weren’t making progress and I was worried I wasn’t supporting them.

I just felt frustrated and stuck.

I was also coteaching for the first time. I liked my time in the classroom and I love my coteacher Drew. But the unit we were working on at the beginning of the year wasn’t something either of us was really excited about and neither of us felt like we had a voice in the planning process. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what we wanted out students to know, understand, and do, and was just doing my best to infuse appropriate writing skills instruction into the unit.

And then, Shakespeare showed up. Specifically, Romeo and Juliet. Drew had done a Folger Ed workshop (taught by another amazing colleague, Gina) over the summer and was really excited to teach Shakespeare through performance. I was nervous. Because, you guys, R&J is really dirty. And we’re teaching 8th grade English. I also had to unexpectedly fly solo for the intro lesson. I was terrified.

But it turned out great:

Reviewing exit tickets. What are @DrewManities and my Eng Ss most excited about for our upcoming #Shakespeare unit? Bawdy puns. #coteaching

— Samantha Mosher (@samosher2118) December 3, 2015

And all of a sudden, I was feeling that high that comes from a great lesson with a room full of engaged students.

I stood in class trying to keep a straight face as kids began asking questions like “Mr. Murphy, what’s a maidenhead?”

Or:

“When he says ‘thrust maids to the wall’ he means…”

“Exactly what you think he means.”

“Ohhhhhhh…”

And then started having amazing, deep conversations about the role of women during Shakespeare’s time and how awful it was that Samson and Gregory weren’t really worried about raping Montague women, but were terrified of getting into an argument with Montague men. Because the second one is the thing that will get them hung.

They were interested and excited. And so was I.

They were engaging in close reading of Shakespeare without eye rolling.

They were on their feet and acting and directing.

And I was walking into school with a much more positive outlook. I was looking forward to English class, to planning with Drew. I was even looking forward to grading paragraphs about Romeo and his take on love in Act 1.

From S writing on #romeoandjuliet: “The ‘arrow’ is not an arrow, if you know what I mean.” #Shakespeare #engchat This unit is amazing.

— Samantha Mosher (@samosher2118) January 5, 2016

Now I’m even ready to dive into researching math interventions and trying out new strategies for my 5th graders. It’s amazing what one unit can do.

Have you had a time when you felt burned out and like you weren’t accomplishing what you wanted to in the classroom? How did you get your teaching groove back?

Planning for Student Centered IEP Meetings

Student centered IEP meeting prep — A student working on self-evaluating her progress toward her goals

Over the next few weeks I’m going to have parents come into my room to discuss their child’s learning plan for next year. And I’m going to turn the meeting over to the student. It’s the first time I’ve ever done student centered IEP meetings (or ILP–Individual Learning Plan–meetings as they’re called in my school). And I’m terrified. But I’m also very excited.

Step 1: Completing Digital Portfolios for the Year

I took the first step toward having students self-reflect more and take more responsibility for their own learning when I tried out digital portfolios with my M2 students this year. For me, the logical next step was to have students do a final self-reflection at the end of the year that led to them evaluating their own progress, and then helping to lead their own student centered IEP meetings. I’m also trying this with my M3 students, who, as you may remember, “don’t go in for all that touchy-feely nonsense” like self-reflection and growth mindset. We’ll see how that goes.

Step 2: Self-Evaluation and Setting New Goals

After my students completed their portfolio work, they evaluated their progress on a more global level in order to prepare them to help lead their student centered IEP meetings: How do all of these examples of various skills within a broader goal to show progress? What do I still have left to learn? What’s the next step? How can I continue to improve next year?

Student centered IEP meeting goal setting — A student working on goal setting for his student centered IEP meeting

The students filled out the form below, describing their goal, choosing evidence from their portfolio to demonstrate their progress, rating their progress, explaining the rating, and then, with some guidance from me, setting a new goal.

Student-centered IEP meeting goal self-evaluation sheet — The goal reflection/self-evaluation sheet for our student-centered IEP meeting planning.

For the most part, they were able to evaluate their own progress. There were some students who were really hard on themselves. Those students needed redirection to focus on their progress as an individual, rather than comparing themselves to others. There were also some who immediately said they had met all of their goals, without evaluating their progress in their portfolios. These tended to be the same students who didn’t want to complete portfolio work when it was scheduled. Next year, I’d like to spend more time modeling how to evaluate progress toward a goal. I thought that the amount of evaluation we did when working on portfolios would be enough, but it really wasn’t.

Step 3: Evaluating Accommodations

Next, we moved on to evaluating how well accommodations worked and what new accommodations we should try for next year.

Student centered IEP meeting: evaluating accommodations — Student working on evaluating his accommodations (clearly keyboarding is one of them)

Here it became clear to me that even though I thought I had done a good job empowering my students to be advocates for their own learning, the students didn’t really understand their accommodations. When we went through them their response was often “teachers don’t really do that.” This, of course, may not be totally accurate, because a lot of these things happen behind the scenes. It was concerning, though, that the students weren’t always aware of what their accommodations were. I think next year at the beginning of the year, we’ll review the learning plans again so that students know what their accommodations are, and maybe have a few specific lessons on how to self-advocate.

Personal butlers are not IEP accommodations. Sorry. — This kid was really disappointed that a personal butler was not a possible accommodation.

I also (see above) should really spend a little more time discussing what accommodations are and aren’t. Wanting a personal butler notwithstanding, I was surprised that many students didn’t understand why they got specific accommodations. I expected to have to explain what was possible, but didn’t realized I would have to explain what their accommodations meant. I remember doing it earlier in the year. Maybe it’s a matter of revisiting throughout the year.

Step 4: Prepare for the Student-Centered IEP Meeting

Our last step was to prep for the meeting. Students completed an organizer where they decided how they might introduce themselves, their parents, and me, and how they would explain the purpose of the meeting. We talked about how much leadership each student was comfortable with taking, and decided on signals they could use if they needed me to take over. Then, each student took turns role playing their meeting.

I’m really excited by how confident and empowered my students seem while we’re going through this process. I really hope that they’ll feel successful when they complete their meetings and that next year they’ll take more ownership of their goals as we work on them. I’ll follow up soon with how these student centered IEP meetings went and what I’d like to do differently next year.

Have you ever done a student centered IEP meeting? What were your experiences?

When We Say a Student Can’t Learn

Via Saved by the Bell Hooks (the site might be the best thing ever)

Teaching is a profession that can be both extraordinarily rewarding and extraordinarily frustrating–sometimes simultaneously. Sometimes we’re tempted to throw our hands up in the air and proclaim that this student just can’t learn. And sometimes we do.

And when we as educators say that a student can’t learn, we’re saying a lot of other things, even if they’re not things we really mean or believe. It’s such a tiny statement–a throwaway line when we’re frustrated–and, yet, it has a million connotative meanings that don’t even occur to us as the words escape our lips.

When we say a student can’t learn, we’re saying that we’ve given up on her.

When we say a student can’t learn, we’re saying that his needs as a learner are not a priority.

When we say a student can’t learn, we might mean we don’t know how to teach her, but we’re saying that she needs to shape up and get with the program.

When we say a student can’t learn, we’re saying that we’ve tried all the tricks in our toolbox and are afraid to ask for help. Someone might judge us, might say we’re a bad teacher, might tell us that if we were more competent, built better relationships, went to this PD, we’d be fine. Look at the teacher down the hall. She’s fine.

When we say a student can’t learn, we’re saying “I’m not a bad teacher. I’m doing everything I know how.”

When we say a student can’t learn, we’re saying that we’re scared.

When we say a student can’t learn, we’re saying “I don’t know how to help this kid and the 24 others in my class.”

When we say a student can’t learn, we’re saying we don’t care about her.

When we say a student can’t learn, we’re saying that we are tired.

When we say a student can’t learn, we’re saying he’s not my problem.

When we say a student can’t learn instead of “I don’t know what to do, and…”, “I’ve tried everything I know how, but…” or “I don’t know how to teach her, so…” we’re saying that it’s easier to put the responsibility for making sure everyone learns on the student rather than on ourselves.

When we say those words, we’re saying so many things. Deciding what we really mean and taking action will determine how successful we are in teaching that student.

When we hear someone else say those words, we need to take a step back and withhold judgement and offer our support as colleagues to help turn the discussion toward something proactive and helpful. In order to try to build a school culture where people feel safe saying “I don’t know what to do” and asking for help, we need to offer that help and support freely and without judgement. We can’t look at our colleagues and say “This teacher can’t learn,” either.

Getting Started with Digital Portfolios

Front page of one of our digital portfolios — The front page of one student’s digital portfolio.

This year I’m piloting digital portfolios with my M2 (grade 6) class. I noticed last year that there wasn’t a lot of communication between the Learning Support program and parents. There aren’t really grades, and there’s the occasional email, but more often than not, no work goes home. Most of the work that parents do see are the results scaffolding and specialized graphic organizers, and other supplements and complements to classroom instruction. Last year, in my first year in the position, with the help of my principal we added more transparency by creating learning plans for students that contained goals for the skills that would be addressed during the school year (I know, for those of you in public schools this is SOP, but it something that seems to be slowly becoming a part of international schools). I thought this was great, but I wanted to do more. Then I got connected to Matt Renwick through Twitter and his blog, and started reading his book Digital Student Portfolios. I decided to create digital portfolios that were primarily designed to show growth, but that could be used to showcase certain pieces of work or activities that students were particularly proud of. I wanted to use digital portfolios as an opportunity to create a dialogue with students and parents about growth, and to continue to build a culture of self-reflection for learning in my classroom.

The first challenge I faced was finding the right platform to use to create the digital portfolios. My school has a pretty strict “no use of 13 and over programs and apps by students under 13” policy, so Evernote, the platform Matt discusses in his book, was out. The school’s Tech Integrator and I discussed Google Sites, Blogger (both part of our school’s Google Apps for Education subscription) or Weebly. I ended up dismissing Blogger because I wouldn’t be able to house several blogs on the same page, and I knew that teaching students how to effectively use tags would take a while. After making two sample portfolios, one in Weebly and one in Google Sites, I decided that Weebly would work best for my purposes and be easiest for the students to use. So far, I would recommend this as a platform.

Benefits

Weebly is really easy to use. It’s uses a drag and drop system to add pictures, buttons, URLs, and HTML code. I even taught my students how to embed Google Docs in their Weebly blogs (something I had thought would be easier with Google Sites).
Not having the easy-embed function from Google Sites led to a mini-lesson on HTML, which the students seemed to enjoy.
The school’s educator account provides some measure of privacy and security for students. Their sites are password protected.
If students forget passwords, etc they are all managed by our Instructional Technology department.
It’s easy for students to personalize and make their own.
It’s easy to share with parents and for them to navigate.
Creating individual blogs for each goal allows us easily see progress on individual goals, and the most recent activity (that, I hope, represents the students’ current progress toward the goal) is at the top of the page.
The blog format allows me, their classroom teachers, their parents, and, if they choose, their peers, to comment on the work that they share and ask questions about it.

Drawbacks

Weebly is extremely customizable, which is a good thing. I want students to take ownership of their portfolios I had to get through a few classes of students playing around with the design of their website, which was OK, but often what they thought of as a “good design” made their message difficult to understand. I think the next time I do this, I need to spend a bit more time on the front end integrating instruction on how design can influence the audience’s ability to understand our message, maybe using specific websites (possibly even my own) as examples.
Although there is a way for the student and I to be co-owners of a Weebly site, the Tech Integrator and I haven’t been able to make it work yet. This is something that would have been much easier with Google Sites or with Blogger, but I think the ease of use more than makes up for this.
The one blog per goal set up makes it more difficult to use tags to see connections between assignments and activities that match up to multiple goals.
Next year, I need to do a better job reviewing the difference between personal online communication and professional online communication (particularly editing one’s work before posting it online–see the spelling error above).

Overall, I have been completely blown away by all the things that I could do with a digital portfolio that I wouldn’t have been able to do with a traditional portfolio. I had just assumed that a digital portfolio would be a substitution for a physical portfolio or it would be an augmentation, adding some functional improvement, but not significantly different from the physical version. I am, however, starting to see that digital portfolios are really modifications of traditional portfolios, allowing my students, their parents, and me to do things that weren’t possible with the original paper format. I’m excited to continue our work and I’ll keep you updated as I keep working with the students on building their portfolios.

Have you used digital portfolios? What have been your successes? Learning experiences?

Pausing to Reflect: Self-Reflection on Teaching Self-Reflection

Image by David Whelan via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Self-reflection is an important part of growth and learning. I’m trying to ask my students to do more of it this year. I’m asking my M2 (grade 6) students to create digital portfolios (more on them soon..check out Matt Renwick’s book though!) where they track their progress toward goals they’ve set for themselves, as well as the goals that I’ve created for them for the learning plans or IEPs. Within the SRSD writing framework I’m asking students to evaluate their own work, reflect on their progress, and set new goals for themselves. Many of them enjoy these activities, but I have had several students who were resistant. The most interesting response that I got was that it was “tacky” to do self-reflections. I still haven’t figured out what she actually meant. But given that resistance I thought I should practice what I preach and figure out what went wrong.

Clearly something was making this student uncomfortable, even if she was having difficulty articulating it. Did she mean that the task–write a note to your parents that I would share with them at parent-teacher conferences telling them how you thing you’re doing meeting your goals–felt inauthentic and maybe a little weird? I suppose I can’t actually argue with her there. It might not have been able to come up with something a little more authentic. Is “tacky” for this kid like Holden Caufield’s “phony”? Had she just been asked to do the same exercise in all of her other classes and it was just enough? I realized that in addition to all of those possibilities, I hadn’t ever actually made reflection something real–something that I engage in both at work and in my day-to-day life. I didn’t let her know about all the ways reflection happens in the real life of an adult. And, yes, none of them involve a letter to my mom…

When I’m teaching I ask myself whether lessons went well and why or why not, including how I interacted with students, and I do some self-reflection in writing on this blog;
When I improvise a recipe I reflect on cooking techniques and ingredient choices and I make notes for what I’ll do if I try it again;
When I bake bread I take a bite of the finished loaf and reflect on my technique and the choices I made about rising time and liquid-to-flour ratios;
When I finish I run I ask myself if I’m tired and whether I could have pushed myself to run faster or farther;
When I finish knitting a sweater I look at how it fits and make notes about how I might change things the next time I knit a sweater so that it will fit even better.

As much as I am philosophically all for letting kids know why what I’m asking them to do is important to their lives–not just their lives as students, but their lives as human beings–sometimes I don’t do a great job of remembering to tell them that these are things that I’m not just telling them that people do, but that I do. And because I’ve learned that this helps me to be successful, I think it’s important to teach my students. Maybe I need to look into ways to making my self-reflection practices more transparent to my students, the same way I talk about what I’m reading or ways that I used math that day.

How do you make skills that seem like “school” things, but are a actually a part of your everyday life as an adult, feel relevant to your students? How do you make self-reflection activities authentic?

The Dream of Differentiated PD

The problem with traditional PD--why we need differentiated PD — From Jen Henga via Flicker

I think the thing that stuck with me the most when I went to CGC was the idea that everyone learns. And everyone means everyone–students, teachers, administrators–we’re all learners. To me, the CGC principle that learning is scaleable is the most important one for me this year in my new role as Instructional Coach as well as Learning Specialist. I think that trying to develop differentiated PD for the faculty is one of the most important things I can do this year to ensure that everyone learns, both because I’m modeling what I want teachers to do and because I want teachers to get what they need from PD and find it useful. So I sent this out into the Twitterverse:

Has anyone differentiated their #PD presentations for faculty? What have you done? How has it worked #educoach

— Samantha Mosher (@samosher2118) October 14, 2014

Crickets.

I can’t believe that no one is trying this. It could be I didn’t use the right hashtags. It could be that I tweeted at the wrong time of day. Maybe I need to follow some of Matt Renwick’s tips here. But I came up with nothing. So I’ve been muddling through on my own, and there are a couple places where I’m still stuck.

Readiness: How Do I Know What They Don’t Know?

I work with people who come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. They’ve been teaching anywhere from a couple of years to a couple of decades. They have various comfort levels with differentiation and various opinions on whether or not it even has a place in our school. I’ve used a variety of different tools to try to get at this, but I’m always left with the following questions:

How easy is it for teachers to be vulnerable with their colleagues and admit they don’t know?
If part of the purpose of preassessment is to preview and maybe show learners that they have something to learn about the topic, how do you make sure that people who may see themselves as knowledgable (but may not be) feel neither talked down to or threatened?

When I tried to create a preassessment questionnaire for my last PD session, one colleague gave me the feedback that it was “too intense and detailed” and might “scare people off” or make the “feel threatened”, another colleague gave me the advice that it didn’t cover enough and really wouldn’t give an adequate preview of what people would learn. I ended up not handing it out, leaving me feeling unprepared and like I wasn’t modeling what I wanted the staff to do.

I think today this might be more successful. I used exit tickets from our last session to group people by interest. We’ll see how it goes.

Interest: How Do I Keep Things Relevant?

I’m pretty good at helping teachers develop differentiated units and projects, but there are definitely areas that are outside my comfort zone and knowledge, most specifically subjects outside of the MESH (Math, English, Science & Humanities) or core subject domains. I’m not sure what to do that will be relevant to disciplines like PE, Art, and Music,, and sometimes Modern Languages, but I do want to make sure these teachers feel included and like a part of our professional learning community.

Things I’m trying this year:

Flexible groupings: grade levels, subject areas, general interests.
Using teacher-leaders from those disciplines to act as leaders or experts in small groups.
Talking to these teachers: what do you want? What can I do to make this relevant?

The thing is though, I’m still up against years of these teachers feeling not included or marginalized, and that’s the added piece here that I’m really not sure how to deal with.

Taking Risks

So trying all of this means I’m taking some risks with how I’m structuring PD. Some of them may fail, and I’ll reflect from them and learn from them. However, I’m worried that by taking those risks and failing to get it right I might make people feel like their time is being wasted. And we all know how happy teachers are when their time is being wasted (we’ve all been there and been really angry about it). So how do I find the balance between taking risks with how I’m delivering PD and playing it safe with my use of my colleagues’ time? I wonder if this is why so many schools and districts stick with the “sit and get” model of PD. People may not always enjoy it, but they’re not complaining too much.

Any thoughts? If you lead PD at your school, how do you approach these situations?

Tests, Tests, Tests

We’ve hit that point in the year when the first units are starting to wrap up and all of my students are starting to panic about tests. Most of them have no reason to panic: They know what they need to do, but they have some sort of test anxiety. Many students, however, don’t really know how to study, which increases this anxiety. They spend most of their time working on what they already know how to do and not enough working on what they don’t know. Most likely they do this because they’re just not sure how to study what they don’t know or understand.

This year I decided to try to explicitly teach these skills, starting with knowing what to study. I created a study guide for the students in my learning support class. It’s essentially a self-assessment rubric that lists the various topics on the test and allows students to sort themselves into one of three categories: Got it!, Working on it!, or I need more practice. Each category is defined (see below–it’s not pretty, but it did the job). What made me really excited was that when I shared it with the general ed math teachers, they all chose to use it with their classes.

Once the student completed the form, we looked at the areas that they thought were the weakest and created plans for how they would study. My original idea was to have them actually make a plan using their studybook or a calendar with activities they would do in order to study for each of the concepts they were unsure of, but it became clear pretty quickly that my students we they not sure what to study, they also weren’t sure how to study. We had to do a lesson about how to study, and how to study for math tests in particular.

We discussed that the best way to study for math was to practice doing problems that are similar to what will be on the test and discussed places to find questions with answers (our textbook being the main source). The other important piece was making sure to refer to notes and other sources either while completing a problem (if you are having difficulty remembering the steps) or after completing a problem. Because note taking is another area we’re working on, I created these checklists to help students practice.

I laminated copies of the checklist for each student so that they could use a dry-erase marker to check off the steps as they completed them. As they worked with the checklists, they became more confident in their abilities and were able to practice the steps of the process. Eventually, I’d like to get them to the point where they can make their own checklists from their notes, but before that can happen we need to work on note taking skills.

The last step in this whole process is going to be reflection. Once students have taken the test, they will be allowed to do corrections. I created this test corrections sheet and shared it with the math teachers.

I like this test corrections sheet because it asks students to think about what might have gone wrong during an assessment, whether it is careless errors or really not understanding a concept or a process. I’m hoping that this will help us with reteaching and intervention, and that maybe we can offer students another opportunity to show what they know after reteaching in the form of a retest or another assignment.

How do you teach study skills? What do you do about test corrections or retakes? What opportunities do you offer students to demonstrate mastery of a topic after the assessment is done?