Final Collaboration Post

The frustrating thing about teaching is the lack of time we experience every year.  Without fail, April rolls around and the school year just begins to snowball to a close.  It goes too fast and teachers are forced to rush to get lessons completed and other tasks accomplished. This time of year can make collaborating very difficult, which is what Jim and I experienced during my Power of Words/Book Thief Unit.

Jim was not able to read The Book Thief himself, so he wasn't able to make mention of it with his classes as he taught the Holocaust time period.  He was able to go over many different examples of the power of words with his students, such as speeches and other pieces of writing throughout history (not just during WWII).   Unfortunately, I was just finishing up my unit while Jim was just starting to get to that time period.

Our conversations were the most valuable part of this collaboration experience.  In our final meeting we reflected back on the entire experience and how wonderful it was to listen to what one another teaches, when, and with what tools.  The theme idea I had for my unit was something Jim found to be equally important in his Honors European History class.  We both plan on making this a yearly theme next year in each of our courses, with plans to center an essential question around it for our students.

Another wonderful thing that came out of this collaboration was an idea to have a common final project for the year, between both myself, Jim, and another colleague from the English department, Meadow. We all have sophomore honors students, so we've decided to have students do a creative project linking the texts they've read this year and those characters and themes from those novels with actual moments in history or real people they've learned about in history.  We would be allowing students to choose how they present their understandings, whether it's an i-Movie, a painting, etc. but students are not allowed to just write a paper. I'm very excited to roll this final project out to my students and I think they will appreciate an assignment that will count in both courses and that will give them a chance to link what they learned for me and show how they see it as relevant to history. Even though this isn't directly related to my unit, I believe it will be a valuable collaboration project and that students will benefit greatly from it.

Overall, I've thoroughly enjoyed my collaboration experience with Jim Burrell this year. He is an intelligent, creative, and supportive partner to work with.  He has an appreciation for the content I teach, as I have for his. He's willing to try new things and bottom line, he loves kids.  He likes teaching and enjoys making his classroom a fun and rewarding experience for his students.  I'd work with him again in a heartbeat and I'm looking forward to further collaborations with him in the future.

Collaboration Reflection Post #2

My second collaboration meeting with Jim was just as fun as the first.  This one was much more focused on teaching methods then our last meeting, mostly because so much of my Stage 3 work was spent thinking of strategies and methods that I want to use with my students throughout this unit.

I found that a lot of what I want to use for strategies are things that Jim is familiar with, which is AWESOME!  He already uses Venn diagrams, ThinkPairShares, Frayer models, and is familiar with Wordles.  He also use to be an English teacher so he's interested in the slam poetry and other writing my students will be doing during the unit.

He isn't as familiar with working the i-Movie program or Garage Band, but the best thing about him is that he's eager to learn new things. Even if he doesn't have his own students use these same pieces of technology with his content in his class, at least he is open to learning about those tools.

Chapters 11 & 12: Inservice/Preservice Teachers & TPCK

As I read these two chapters, many quotations really hit home about the state of education today. One I enjoyed in particular was, “If we teach today as we taught yesterday, then we rob our children of tomorrow” (223). Such a true statement! Our students will need very different skills in their future and teachers cannot just rely on how they themselves were taught to get the job done. Technology alone faces teachers with endless content they never had when they were in school, but MUST expose their students to now.

This brings me to another great quote: “Tomorrow’s teachers must be prepared to rethink, unlearn, and relearn, change, revise, and adapt” (225). Bottom line, if teachers are not open to this idea they will never be successful with preparing their students for the future. I work with so many teaches who just go through the motions during technology workshops, but never really consider how it’s all relevant for their content and their students. (Granted, we are also don’t get to experience these technology workshops in content directed sessions which could help with this.) Why is it when fellow teachers try and share new ideas and practices with their colleagues there are always so many who feel as though their own teaching quality is being questioned??? And what if it was? Is it a bad thing that we are expected to evolve? Change? Better ourselves and our teaching?

I have to agree with Sammie’s post about seeing the benefits in observations in other classrooms and other schools. I also wish this was done more frequently. I’d certainly love to get out there and see other teachers and how they’re adapting to these ever changing times. If more teachers were open to ideas like this then teaching strategies would be improving at a much more rapid rate.

Chapter 10: The role of TPCK in physical education

To be honest, I have never really given much thought to how physical education teachers assess their classes, let alone the challenges that might arise when throwing in the technology aspect into the situation.  After reading this chapter, I realize technology is a crucial tool in assessing student performance in physical education.  The author mentions the ability to gather data to evaluate student performance and with the number of students that phys. ed. teachers have to keep track of, the right kind of technology is needed for this.  I also understand that the cost for technology for this concentration is huge, but luckily districts like Mt. Blue have the one-to-one laptop program, which helps alleviate many costs and opens up many opportunities for technology to be used in a physical education classroom.

It was refreshing to read about student motivation being important.  Physical education, like many classes, is a difficult subject to get every student motivated for.  Students are more motivated when they have instant data and feedback.

This chapter appeared a bit more forced, or awkward than the others.  I almost felt like TPCK is more difficult to find overall in physical education.  Maybe if the chapter had also focused more on health education that would have helped.

Integrated Unit Meeting w/Social Studies Teacher

So...with only a few hours to go I'm just now realizing that I did this wrong. Bummer. Basically, I had my meeting with my colleague who teaches history at Mt. Blue and shared my unit plan with him, so far.  (I didn't realize I was suppose to assist him in creating his Stage 1.)  Here's what we talked about:

I shared my unit with him and we discussed how he still has yet to read The Book Thief.  He seemed to really enjoy my theme The Power & Value of Words.  He mentioned how it is a really great yearly focus and could come up in almost any of his units.

Then we moved on to the topic of the Holocaust and what he'd cover in his history class.  We bounced ideas back and forth about topics he would talk about with his students, which were: discrimination (racism & sexism), bias (profiling & stereotyping), hate (anger, frustration, & scapegoating), dehumanization, social hierarchy (classes  - superiority/inferiority), perfection (positive/negative).

Jim is really excited to be teaching these topics and ideas at the same time and we even talked briefly about co-teaching a lesson or two together (no specific details yet).  Jim is really energetic and I think he will be really fun to work with on this.

Chapter 9: Science, technology, and teaching - The topic-specific challenges of TPCK in science

When I think of science it is one of the first subjects that I think completely relies on technology.  You can’t teach science without it!  It’s the first place I learned to how use a microscope, a Bunsen burner, and did real research about the world around me with computers.  (And this was before the access our students have now.)  Science opens up new worlds to our students and now with the technology at our fingertips we can actually show them things that were never available before.  When I was in school science was a subject that depended on their financial budget to buy technology for class.  Now students can just go on the internet to watch lab experiments, see tornados and volcanoes in action, and watch other fascinating things they might not be able to study the same way otherwise.  They can hear about it from their teacher, or learn about it from their textbook, but the internet has given them the power to see it happen.  It’s amazing!  I am personally a very visual learner and would have benefitted from these teaching tools when I was in school.  Everyday their are now students who succeeding in their science classes because of the hands on learning and the technological learning they are experiencing.  Many of them might not have had the same experience if it wasn't for those strategies being in place.

Chapter 7: Perhaps a matter of imagination - TPCK in mathematics education

I hate math! I mean reeeeaalllly hate it.  Math was a seriously scarring part of my high school experience.  First of all, it doesn’t come easy to me.  The subject doesn’t just make sense like words do.  I could even fake my way through history…no biggie. However, math took extra time, many late nights, and tears for me to actually understand and succeed throughout my classes…and even then the actual comprehension was questionable.

My own personal troubles with the subject aside, I also never had a math teacher who even attempted to make math interesting, intriguing, or engaging.  Not only were the subject and the teaching method boring, but all my math teachers were on auto-pilot for my four years of high school.  They didn’t care that I was struggling and they didn’t even offer much intervention with my problem.  I was made to feel that if I couldn’t keep up with the rest of the “school of fish” then I needed to just find my own way.  My freshman year I went so far as to get a tutor over the summer so I could get my math credit.  I felt stupid and a burden on my math teachers.  To this day those negative feelings about math still haven’t gone away.

This chapter had a few really great quotes pertaining to how TPCK can make math teachers better at their jobs.  On page 159 the text refers to TPCK teachers as “caring teachers who are comfortable with change”.  This is something all teachers should be.  On 161 the text says, “A successful program would most likely need to encourage an ‘imaginative openness’ for classroom experimentation in using technologies for learning mathematical content”.  There is no doubt in my mind that I would have enjoyed and succeeded much more in my own math classes if I had been encouraged to have “imaginative openness” and if my math teachers had even attempted to integrate technology in their teaching (besides calculators and the occasional overhead projector).  The last quote I want to share is from page 162 and it reads: “When a trusted and caring teacher is leading the class discussions, patiently giving alternate explanations for difficult concepts, or simply helping students to periodically ‘mess around with mathematical ideas’,’ then these students will indeed be more willing to push their personal limits in understanding mathematics”.  It’s sooo true…and boy, do I feel cheated.