Wrapping it all Up

So now that we're wrapping up our projects and finishing up the semester, I can reflect on this class and think about some of the things that I learned and will take with me into my current teaching career and my future administrative career. I can also reflect on some of the frustrations that I had and probably will have in the real world as well.

An Eye-Opening Experience
It's not often that I have participated in something, classes included, which left me totally questioning everything I do in my job and everything that I have been taught in the past. This, however, is not a bad thing. This is an awesome thing. I found, while taking this class, that my eyes were really opened to how I can make education more effective and why there are so many frustrations in education in the world today. I always kind of complained about the way that certain things worked (like testing, curriculum expectations, etc.), but after this class I can actually pinpoint some of the problems that I see in education and work on bettering them for myself and my students. I know now that I need to really contemplate what I want my students to come out of my class understanding and what I want them to take with them for years to come. I also really need to ask myself if my activities in class are really helping the kids get to the understandings that I hope they will have? Do my means justify my ends? I have learned so many things that I now ask myself all the time that I am really excited to start a new school year and hopefully make more of a difference.

Frustrations
With all of this wonderful information that I have acquired this semester, there are some frustrations that I am still grappling with. One of those frustrations has to do with assessments. I really believe that creating a meaningful assessment to check for enduring understandings is so important, but I also think that this task is very challenging on a couple levels. In creating the assessments for our UbD projects, we constantly kept going back to make the rubrics and expectations more and more specific and I suppose that that is something that may become easier with time. On another level, as I think about transferring what I now know about assessments into the classroom, I am a little daunted by the amount of time that goes into creating these meaningful activities and assessments. I suppose that I would just have to take things little by little.

I suppose that what's more frustrating is that the changes that I am trying to make are changes that I am really making by myself. I will certainly share ideas and concepts with my grade level teachers, but nobody is looking to see that these changes are made. It frustrates me that my district is not working towards curriculum design that follows the UbD format when it's clear that this is the way that it should work. I know, at this time in my life, that this is something that I can't really do anything about which makes it worse! I will, however, share my groups UbD project with my administrators because they are looking to revamp the new teacher program. Baby steps!

Overall, this has been a great experience that has really taught me a lot about the way education works today versus the way that it should work. I hope, after I finish this program, to be able to help in the push to revamp education so that it actually makes sense.

NJCCCS Handout

Career Education and Consumer, Family and Life Skills
Core Curriculum Content Standards:

Summary of NJ CCCS 9.1 and 9.2:
All students will develop career awareness and leadership skills and hone their personal and interpersonal relationships. Students will learn to prepare for family and business relationships both financially, emotionally, and learn to make ethical and safe life choices.

Career and Technical Education
CCCS 9.1: All Students Will Develop Career Awareness and Planning, Employability Skills and Foundational Knowledge Necessary for Success in the Workplace.

Big Ideas:
· Explore different career opportunities that are necessary in order to make appropriate career and educational choices.
· Develop an understanding of why people work as well as what positive work habits look like.
· Acquire the means to create a resume, conduct themselves on interviews, demonstrate problem-solving skills and recognize how working cooperatively is a pertinent job skill that is transferable from one career to another.
· Participate in real life experiences which range from filling out job applications to working through specific job related problems with a group of students who have a similar interest in the same vocation.

Consumer, Family and Life Skills
CCCS 9.2: All Students Will Demonstrate Critical Life Skills in Order to be Functional Members of Society.

Big Ideas:
Understand how to identify problems in the workplace, home, and school, and map out reasonable steps to solve those problems ethically and appropriately.
Identify ways to improve personal growth and development in order to enhance both business and family relationships.
Understand how the economy can affect business and family life.
Make responsible money choices and create financial plans by participating in related activities.
Develop original thoughts and ideas and learn how to think creatively about solving a problem.

Strengths of Standards 9.1 and 9.2:
Ideas in the standards are important for all students to understand in order to experience success socially in the workplace and in family relationships.
Could be translated into meaningful curriculum writing because some culminating activities are laid out specifically.
Examples:
Designing, implanting and critiquing financial plans
Filling out job applications
Designing a resume
Learning how to interview
Lend themselves to meaningful, hands-on activities which help to ensure the transfer of knowledge and connect students understanding to the “big picture.”
Promote cooperative activities which emphasize good social skills, ethics, and critical thinking.
Offer “out of the box” learners more innovative ways to become skilled at real world situations.

Weaknesses of Standards 9.1 and 9.2:
Unclear how and where these standards would be addressed.
A. some of the ideas from the standards should be addressed across all subject area
B. a portion of the standards seem likely to occur in more of a vocational setting then in a public school setting
Two standards should not be separate because the ideas that are in both should be intertwined into all subject areas.
Language in the standards is much too vague for effective curriculum development.
Example: What are “appropriate work habits?”
What are “ethical behaviors?”
The desired outcomes from the standards are unclear.
Example: What is a “functional member of society?”

What can you as an administrator do to facilitate the learning of these standards?
Make all staff members aware of the portions of these standards that address and look for teachers who promote:
a. critical thinking
b. decision making
c. dealing with conflict
d. working cooperatively
e. making ethical decisions
f. developing self-awareness
g. creating a sense of self worth
Encourage teachers in all subject areas to use rubrics to assess these skills during group work, projects, or culminating activities.

References:
http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/pn/fd/documents/careertechstnd.pdf
http://education.state.nj.us/ccs/?_standard_matrix;c=9
http://www.ntuaft.com/njccs/Webpage/contents/STANDARD%209%Intro.htm
http://www.casel.org/downloads/CE%20in%20CCCS-Summary%20Chart1.pdf
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001295/129533.pdf

Retaining Teachers

In the April edition if Educational Leadership, there is an article called Mission Possible which focuses on recruiting and retaining teachers in a North Carolina school district. As we discussed in class, one of the reasons that so many people leave teaching is because they do not have the support that they need to succeed. This article confirms these ideas. Although these problems are true in all kinds of school districts, they are especially true in urban districts and, unfortunately, in the districts that need the most help and consistency. When the researchers who wrote this article asked other teachers in the state what it would take for them to teach in these challenging schools, they said they would want:

1. A great principal
2. Incentives
3. Compensation for results
4. High-quality professional development
5. Instructional Coaches
6. Small class sizes

Although in this article, the district was able to provide monetary rewards for student performance or incentives for recruitment and retention, it is unrealistic to think that this can happen everywhere. What can happen, however, are districts can develop thought out and meaningful professional development to help create a feeling of security for new teachers in all types of school districts. One of the lessons that the district involved in this study learned was that, "a one-size-fits-all approach [to professional development] will never work. Teachers will engage in the improvement process if they help to create it."

I really feel that this is what we are focusing on in our New Teacher Development UbD groups. In my group, we are working on using professional development such as critical friends groups and peer coaching and in both of these approaches teachers are submerged in the process rather than just being presented to and sent back to the classroom.

Although the North Carolina district is still in the midst if the Mission Possible program, they have noticed positive results (only 10% of the new faculty members left after their first year and many of the new teachers improved their teaching skills and received monetary rewards. Creating meaningful professional development is something that every school district needs to do to support their teachers and I intend to share our UbD group information with my school district when out project is complete.

NT Curriculum Development Process

I am, by nature, a bit of a skeptic and even up through the last week or two I truly did not believe that the New Teacher plan would make sense by the end of the semester. All of a sudden, however, it clicked! I think that it was at the point when we did the 15 session layout when I finally said, "aha!"

Talking about the mission, the big ideas, essential questions, and assessments was all well and good, but at this point in our lives most of us are still teachers and possess that burning question...what are we going to do with the students? Finally, it all makes sense. This process has been a bit like learning to ride a bike. I was very shaky at the beginning but now that I have the hang of it I'm excited to go out and do it again.

One of the biggest things that my group, as New Teacher curriculum developers, has focused on is the importance of self reflection. During this process I think that we have really all done a lot of self-reflection ourselves. I know that I have questioned a lot of things that are going on in my district in terms of curriculum development and I have also contemplated a lot of the assessments and goals that I have in my own classroom. In my district, the teachers have a lot of freedom (not sure whether this is good or not!) in terms of what really goes on in the classroom. This is nice in the sense that I can try some new assessments and activities on my own without getting nabbed for it by my principal.

My NT group really worked together well and I was able to see how a curriculum committee in a school district could really create a very functional UBD curriculum for a given subject area. This would of course be assuming that all members are working towards the same goal. Creating curriculum is a big task and it's easy to miss things here and there, so having this group to collaborate with is a great way to submerge yourself in the process for the first time.

Hopefully the baby steps that we have taken to get through this NT process will now make it easier for each one of us to individually take this information back to our own districts so we can try to get teaching back on track as teachers and maybe one day as administrators.

Assessment Dilemma

Since we have been working in our UbD groups, I have been thinking a lot about assessment and how it relates to student learning. The section that I am ultimately responsible for in my group is the assessment portion and working on it has really made me question some of the assessments that I have in my classroom. I am not afraid to admit that I am guilty of two things that we have talked about making sure NOT to do in our group:

1. I definitely lead my third graders towards doing well on assessments in order to ensure that they walk out of my room as "successful" students when really all they proved was that they can memorize and take a test.

2. Although I know that the rote information that students need to know for some tests is not useless, I have recently asked myself "What is the purpose of the kids learning this information?" I'm finding that things don't tie in the way that they should

So after realizing that the way that things work in my classroom may not be the best (although I really do believe that my kids are learning and walking away with more than they came in with), I also am realizing that changing the way that you approach assessment in the classroom can be really hard! In our class, it's easy to see that we need those essential questions to drive student learning and all our activities need to be focused on addressing them, but I'm noticing that it's a lot easier to create a UbD unit from scratch than it is to change what we're already used to. I have certainly tried to incorporate some more "real world" applications with my students since I have been more aware, but coming up with them at the spur of the moment is not as easy as it sounds and creating projects that reflect application is time consuming...especially when you teach elementary school and must address multiple subject areas. Right now our Language Arts Committee is rewriting the curriculum and they are using UbD as a model. This, I suppose, is a better way to go about instigating change than one or two teachers trying to rewrite things for their own classroom. I am looking forward to what they come up with and I am also looking forward to the day when I get to sit on a curriculum committee and voice my opinion and help initiate change.

Odds and Ends

My blog this week is twofold. First, I want to discuss UbD assessments and second, I want to discuss an idea that my UbD group is discussing in class and a related article that I read this weekend.

I have to say that I was not surprised when I read that teachers should not be focusing solely on grades and easily graded assessments in which there are clear answers, but more on rubrics and the actual quality of the students' responses. As Wiggins and McTighe state, "It is not a matter of simple right versus wrong but more or less naive or sophisticated, more or less superficial or in depth"(175). Something that really stuck out at me was, once again, this idea of transferability. In light of the whole UbD model, rubrics make perfect sense in terms of assessing student progress. This notion is so important and it is something that is really lost in most classrooms today. It was almost as if Wiggins and McTighe were reading my mind because the task of creating these rubrics seemed somewhat overwhelming and as soon as I thought that they provided me with a great way of attacking this task. Separating student work into three or four piles and defining the characteristics of each pile is a manageable way to go about creating a rubric.

In my school we use rubrics a lot because the state provides us with rubrics that they use to assess the NJask tasks. What I try to do is take those main ideas and create rubrics that are more kid-friendly so we can actually look at it together and the kids can use it to critique their own work as well. This seems to work nicely, especially in writing. My concern would be that if everything was assessed using a rubric, that the parents would really come down hard on teachers at report card time because there are no "traditional" grades to pull from.

On a totally unrelated note, my UbD group has been talking a lot about how new teachers need to be aware of the community in which they teach and what their students may be bringing into the classroom. They need to understand that culture does affect teaching and that external environments are ever-present. In the March issue of Education Leadership, there is an article called As Diversity Grows, So Must We and it really addresses a lot of issues that teachers (new and veteran) need to be aware of. The student populations in many school districts are becoming more and more diverse and as that article states, "Some teachers, administrators, and parents view their schools' increasing diversity as a problem rather than an opportunity." I find this to be a very unfortunate statistic, but it does not surprise me. Most people resist change and find it difficult to deal with but the really sad thing here is that it's the kids who lose out when teachers don't embrace cultural differences and use them as building blocks to direct their lessons.

According to Gary Howard, the author of this article, successfully running a culturally diverse school happens in five phases. The phases include building a trust within the school community, confronting social justice, transforming instructional practices, and engaging the whole school community. The ideas in this article, especially those related to transforming instructional practices in order to engage diversity, are ones that I will bring into my UbD group. Awareness seemed to be a common theme throughout the article so I feel that it is necessary to make new teachers aware of how to embrace cultural diversity.

Enduring Understandings that Teachers Grapple With

While I am reading about UbD, I am constantly questioning my own lessons and curriculum and wondering how I would go about changing my approach to teaching my third graders so that they leave the grade with the "enduring understandings" that they need to be successful. This is not an easy task! Making sure that students get these "enduring understandings" is not as simple as merely knowing as a teacher what you want them to know. If teachers and administrations are really hoping to prepare their students with eduring understandings, there are essential questions that must be created, including both overarching and topical issues that must be considered. It is blatently obvious from reading Wiggins and McTighe, that teachers have to actually KNOW WHERE THEY ARE GOING! Let's be honest. We are all really good at teaching the lessons, the hands on activities, and the day to day snipits of what kids need to know to pass the state tests, but do we all really have a good grasp on the big picture?

So we know now that there are six facets of understanding, that there are two types of essential questions that must meet six criteria before actually being essential questions, and that there is a huge difference between factual knowledge and understanding. So now what????? This is what teachers must grapple with. Now I know that questions that are essential should not necessarily be answered in one sentence, but at the same time, you cannot tell if a question is essential unless you look at it in the whole scheme of your plan. I also know that these essential questions must revolve around things that reccur throughout life, relate to core ideas within a discipline, encourage students to inquire, and engage a diverse group of learners. On top of this I need to make sure that the questions that I'm asking my students are not leading them to the answer because I know that they must uncover the answers themselves and I also know that these questions should have some relevance to their own lives and the real world to help ensure tranferablilty. Oh yeah, and did I mention that there is often a huge misconception on the part of the teachers that what think of as facts are actually understandings and that we often fall into that "Expert Blind Spot"?

Wow! This is a lot for teachers to grapple with. Wiggins and McTighe make it perfectly clear that UbD is the way to go in terms of developing curriculum and the success of the results seems to be undeniable. The hard part appears to be getting started. What makes matters more difficult is that when you gather a group of people together on a curriculum development committee, the chance that all the participants are going to agree on those essential questions and eduring understandings that the students should take with them are pretty slim. Let the grappling begin!

Are certain fads that districts are pushing working towards or against the UbD concept?

As I was doing the readings for this week, I started to think about what activities we do in our classrooms that may or may not make sense in terms of UbD. One fad that has really been pushed in my district over the past two years is that of cooperative learning, team building, and classbuilding activities. With this push, teachers feel that students must be involved in some kind of activity at all times. While there are certainly excellent things that can come out of these group activities, Wiggins and McTighe state that the kinds of questions that we should be posing to our students, "demand more than just a smorgasbord of activities and bits of knowledge in isolated units"(106). This is exactly what we are doing! Ahhh! It seems to me that while I'm sure cooperative group activities can be more geared towards discussing essential questions, that this kind of model would require some more discussions and leadership from the teachers (especially for the little kids)...almost moving in the other direction from what we are currently being asked to do.

Characteristics of a Successful Novice Teacher

I think that somebody who is coming into teaching needs to be aware of a few things. First, NOTHING can prepare you for that first time you walk into a classroom and it's your classroom. Every novice teacher experiences that "now what?" feeling and needs to know that we've all been there (and from time to time still are). So what can a novice teacher do in order to alleviate some of that first year stress? Well, hopefully, a new teacher's mentor can really play a huge role in helping someone over that first year hurdle. Unfortunately, mentors often do not wish to be mentors or have been teaching the exact same way for 30 plus years. Having said that, the first thing that a new teacher needs to do is ask questions. Ask fellow teachers, secretaries, principals....anyone. For the most part, teachers and staff members will help answer questions about policies, routines, etc. The mentor should really be providing the new teacher with information regarding the curriculum and specific programs that the district uses and hopfully that new teacher will have already attended some professional development to set them on the right track. A novice teacher needs to realize that the first year in a classroom is oftentimes just trying to get through the day.

However, a truly successful novice teacher, after teaching a lesson that may have been unsuccessful or mediocre, will sit down and question the purpose of that lesson and rethink it for the following year (or for the following day or week if the kids really did not get it). Something else that I think is important is that the new teacher share changes to the program that he or she may come up with because in most cases it will give veteran teachers some good ideas to work from and it will alleviate staff members talking behind closed doors saying things like, "That new teacher doesn't share any of her ideas with anyone." Novice teachers should try to stay on the good side of the administration and the staff because, lets face it, there is no job security within those first couple years. The boat should not be rocked....yet.

Random Thoughts

So last week I attended two meetings in which my assistant superintendent discussed the very thing that we are learning in class! She explained that the district is working towards incorporating UBD and that while it takes a long time to rewrite all the curriculum, this is the direction in which we are moving. Then, after starting class the other week I understood the concept even more. Now, at the very same time that our district assistant superintendent is telling us about UBD, the principal of my school has asked us to revamp the way in which we write our lesson plans. We now must include a percentage of children who will accomplish a given task for each lesson. Here is my question: If UBD emphasizes the big picture and what these kids will take with them five years from now, isn't having a percentage thrown on something that essentially comes down to "busy work" (i.e. what the curriculum seems to be filled with) something that is sort of working in the opposite direction of where we are trying to go? Is the fact that the principal can see that 95% of students will successfully complete XYZ really showing what he or she has learned?

Just a thought...maybe I'm missing the boat!

What is Curriculum? Who should Design it? Who should Control it?

Curriculum is essentially a guideline which helps (or should help) school districts understand what students are expected to know and by what means they are supposed to obtain that knowledge. According to Wiggins and McTighe, curriculum "refers to the specific blueprint for learning that is derived from desired results"(5-6). Generally speaking, the curriculum that I have seen (and I have not seen all of it that I probably should have !) is primarily a list which tells teachers what they have to teach. This list provides the structure for our whole school year as we try to march our way through all the given tasks. I rarely see any mapping of how to acheive a specific desired performance like Wiggins and McTighe discuss. If curriculum were really based more on the model that Wiggins and McTighe outline, it would undoubtedly guide learning more effectively. I suppose that what I'm saying is that what curriculum is and what curriculum should be are non necessarily synonymous.

Teachers need to be the primary force involved in writing curriculum. Somebody who is not in the classroom cannot possibly sit down and know what will work to motivate and educate students to move toward a desired end. Likewise, a social studies teacher cannot effectively write curriculum for the mathematics department. The teachers involved in writing school curriculum need to be knowledgeable in their content area and able to bring effective teaching strategies to the table. Within my district, there is a big push for UBD and if that is the way that a particular district is moving, those participants on the curriculum committees need to be trained on how to use this method. Finding the correct combination of qualified teachers, supervisors, and administrators is essential in creating effective curriculum.

The question of who should control curriculum is really the hardest one for me to answer. After reading the chapters from SCI, it is obvious that politics has a lot to do with education and that is probably never going to change. While my personal beliefs are that school districts should control their own curriculum, I do understand why governement has to be involved (although I don't necessarily agree that they need to be involved in the ways that they are). For instance, students coming from all parts of the country need to have a somewhat similar basis for education for a couple of reasons. First, as a country, we want to make sure that our youth is receiving the best education possible and without some governmental guidelines and regulations, there would be no assurance that that would happen and no conformity. Also, with so many students attending colleges and universities in different parts of the country, it makes sense to try to at least have some basic guidelines that hold true from state to state and district to district. Having said that, I do believe that is up to specific school districts to find and use the type of curriculum that works best for them and that helps them work towards their mission statement while addressing state standards. Let's face it, what works for an upper middle class school district in the suburbs is not going to work for an Abbott district in the city. This is why plans need to be individualized to a certain extent.

My Personal Mission

It's so hard to narrow down what my personal mission is! I think that what I would like my students to leave my class with is the feeling that they have worked really hard, pushed themselves to their educational limit and come out feeling that they have done their absolute best and learned to work together. One of the greatest things that my kids do at the end of the year is look back at lists and lists of things that they have done throughout third grade and it always amazes them to see what they have accomplished. What's more amazing, however, is when I then remind them about the other things that we have done like cooperative learning groups and activities, helping each other complete work, classroom stories and challenges we have solved as a classroom family....the things that they will really take with them throughout the years both inside and beyond the walls of the school building.