Current Events in the Classroom

I'm Jeanie and I'm a BT3, teaching 7th grade S.S.

We recently had a county memo about how we should handle current events in the classroom. My principal said, "I don't envy you Social Studies teachers. You all are in the trenches." And we are. Students want to talk about everything that our country is experiencing. They have opinions (or rather, their parents opinions) and want to talk about them. 

As a Social Studies teacher, I want them to get excited about current events, but I also don't want the conversation to get away from our purpose. 

The best way I've found to do this is through their Bellwork. 

Bellwork in general is a must. It's so important to have something that students are expected to do right away. If they don't have that, then you risk the kids thinking the beginning of class as "hangout" time, and it's hard to get them focused when you're ready to officially start class. 

I treat my bellwork as a journal, where they can release all of their ideas, but I still try to relate it to what we're doing. 

For example, we are currently in the Reformation unit, and I asked the following question:
Describe a time you, or someone you know/learned about, stood up for what they thought was right, even though others might disagree.

In my last block, Kaepernick came up, and the BLM movement. I opened the discussion up, and had students tell their personal stories as well as their opinions. We even got into why people say "All Lives Matter" and one of the students expressed why they believed it degraded the premise of the BLM movement, and how when they say BLM, they're not saying others don't matter. I think it's super powerful when the kids are thinking through these big concepts as a group. I think we underestimate middle schoolers a lot, because they really do have the potential to really think big.
And I was able to go back to the Reformation by comparing the Protestant Reformation to BLM, as a movement seeking social justice. It was pretty incredible.

How are you?

How are you? We may want to use the teaching phases: Anticipation, Reflection, Disillusion, Survival, Rejuvenation (Know that people will be responding to your posts and offering their insights and advice.) Start with what is working? What challenges did you face this week? (classroom management, discipline, content...) What whoo-hooo celebrate a success? (about your kids, your team, your school, your own successes) What advice have you figured out?

I love your posts! I think we need new labels. While the phases of teaching give us the roller coaster labels, I think there are richer labels such as setting/meeting goals, and the ahhhhhs and Ahhh haaa's of teaching. So if you want to use a different label, or use more than one that is great. Thanks for sharing. I share your work with my preservice teachers. Thank you for helping them with the realities of teaching. This week my students asked how to have conversations about race relations and current protests going on in our country, in the classrooms and schools, while continuing to focus on standards?

Week 4: Survival

My name is Jeanie. I am a BT3 and teach 7th grade Social Studies.

Working: Building relationships with the students is so important to have a good year. That doesn't mean being their best friend. In my mind it can just mean listening to them and acknowledging their presence outside of the classroom setting. I've gone to the first home games, and today I got a lot of kids saying, "I saw you! Did you see me when I did this?!" I was happy to share with their excitement, and it helps because they will forever be on "your side."

This Week's Challenge: "I'm BORED!" A phrase I am coming to hate. I understand a small part of what we do is entertain, but should I feel pressured to entertain all the time, everyday? How can I instill the passion of my subject onto the students? I do "fun" things, I have them moving while doing the "boring" stuff, but they can't do that all the time. Are "old school" ways totally obsolete now?

Whoo-Hoo Success: Organization. The best thing I've ever done was buy a notebook and sheet protectors my first year teaching. I keep my lesson plan for the week (and mark it with a sticky note as a book mark) and a copy of every assignment we do. I have a Google Drive that has everything as well, but when you get something offline, it's hard to keep up with it electronically. Plus, I can keep all my laminated gallery walk pieces. My notebooks have saved me more than once when I have extra time in class and need something to do.
Link to my Google Drive if interested.

Using Data to Drive Instruction // A Whoo-hoo!

We've all heard it before... "use data to help drive your instruction". Sounds pretty simple, right? Well actually, it takes a lot of time and extra effort in order to really use your data for the benefit of your students (and without driving yourself crazy).

One of my personal goals this year as an educator is to really sit down after each assessment and take a look at what the scores are telling me in regards to student proficiency. My outcome (unit) tests or quizzes are all organized by common core state standards and learning targets. I use standards based grading and students are given a score of 0-5 on each learning target.  After grading the tests, I was able to look at each class period and pinpoint which targets students seem to be grasping better than others.

It's one thing to just take note of the proficiency or lack thereof for each class period. However, it's something totally different when you actually use that information to change your next lesson plan(s). For instance, in my freshman level class no student scored a 3 or above on domain and range. Therefore, something wasn't clicking and/or I should change the way I approach my teaching of this topic. I knew there would not be time for me to take multiple class periods going back over this material. So for the next week, we spent a couple of minutes during the warm-up looking at different domain and range situations. Students were encouraged to ask for help from both myself and their classmates during this time. On Friday of that same week, students were given a very short warm-up assessment on domain and range. To my surprise, scores increased dramatically after spending this extra time going a little deeper into these concepts.  (cue whoo-hoo!)

Using data to drive your instruction doesn't necessarily have to take away from class time you've already prepared for. Use the 5-10 minutes as class is starting to look back over some concepts students aren't proficient on (yet!). You'd be amazed at what those few minutes can do for not only their scores but also for their confidence!

How do you use data to drive your instruction? What hesitations do you have?

Twitter Feeds as Rejuvenation

What whoo-hooo celebrate a success? (about your kids, your team, your school, your own successes) What advice have you figured out?

Twitter feeds, give lots of support. Adolescent Success is housed in Australia. They are giving lots of advice and stimulating conversations.
Check it out
#MYEdOz

Week 2/3: Anticipation

I'm Jeanie and I'm a BT3 and a 7th grade Social Studies teacher.

What is working: I have implemented a new strategy this year to help the students kind of sum up their learning. I am going to base every unit on 5 strands of Social Studies: History, Economy, Government, Culture, and Geography. They are my "Building Blocks" and I have a one page summary sheet that we will do after each unit. We just completed our first one for our first unit, "Social Studies 101," which basically just sums up each of the strands. I think it's going to be a very useful tool. It's also a way for kids to have something from previous units, without having to keep EVERY classwork assignment we do.

Challenges: I never had problems with classroom management until now. I am very proud of my classroom dojo rewards system with simultaneous "watch list" consequences, which culminates in loss of a team-wide Fun Friday reward.
It's really only bad in my last block. There are several ADHD students in that class, and by the end of the day, they are all done. It's difficult to get them all focused on the task, and not talking when I'm talking. I hesitate to reprimand them (with an actual consequence, like lunch detention), because I know it's largely due to their attention deficit. I honestly am not sure what to do with that class. Would love any suggestions!

Whoo-Hoo Moment: Today is the day before the unit test. Vocabulary is a large part of the test, and I tried Quizlet Live for the first time ever. IT'S AMAZING!!!!! The kids were totally into it, even with no real prizes. Just the simple competition did it for them. Each student had an iPad and I shuffled the teams every time, which helped the class camaraderie and also paired low-levels with ESL with high-level with average. They seriously did it for 40 mins straight, and by the end they were all experts on the vocab. I never had to worry about someone getting on something else, because every team member on Quizlet Live is essential to win. Try it, it's awesome!

Hope everyone's semester is going well.

Reflection - Week 3

Hi all,

I'm glad to see that I am not the only one that has been unable to blog recently. Honestly, I have been caught up in the normal beginning of the school year hustle with some personal stuff thrown in on top and it has been hard to keep myself to a schedule. I am hoping that this week I can do much better!

I suppose I am currently in a Reflection phase since I am focused on benchmark testing and revising previous year's material. I know that teaching is about constant reflection and this is something I can say my PLC and I work very hard on. It is difficult to say that something you created or taught needs work, but having a supportive system within our PLC makes that process a little easier.

Things are still going smoothly in the classroom. We are preparing to start our first real unit of study (everything up to now has been more preparation for the remainder of the year) and I feel like I have laid the foundation for a successful year with my new students. I see them all attempting all of the assignments and trying to work out their own questions, but I also see that they are willing to struggle. This is something we have really tried to hit hard at the beginning of the year.

Challenges are starting to pop up since the students are starting to come out of their shells. While it is interesting to see some of my students open up and talk to me throughout the day, there are definitely some students that have shared their whole life story with me. They like to talk and so there have been lots of opportunities to reteach expected behaviors. Luckily, there have been no instances that have warranted phone calls home. I have, however, had some out in the hall conferences to help the students reset themselves.

My whoo-hoo moment came after grading out first "official" writing activity. Students went through the entire writing process from brainstorming to publishing on their opinion about the most important school rule. I was impressed with the level that my students are writing at and I am confident that they will be able to work on their skills and improve before moving on to the high school.

Some advice (that I have also had to remind myself) is that the students are still learning the way I work and I am still learning the way they work too. I have to keep in mind that we are still trying to find a way to work together and that will build over time. I am working on getting to know my students and use those little bits of information in the classroom to build a rapport. I am still very hopeful and excited at this point in my year and that is a good feeling for me.

Best wishes for a successful week :)

Vicky

Anticipation/ Survival

How are you? We may want to use the teaching phases: Anticipation, Reflection, Disillusion, Survival, Rejuvenation (Know that people will be responding to your posts and offering their insights and advice.) Start with what is working? What challenges did you face this week? (classroom management, discipline, content...) What whoo-hooo celebrate a success? (about your kids, your team, your school, your own successes) What advice have you figured out?

So since this is the second/third week of this blog and I am just NOW responding should clue you in to some insight on how I am.

Hello, my name is Sara and I am a BT 1.5. I finished my student teaching last December and I taught as an interim teacher and then a full time teacher at a different school where I finished out the school year. Over the summer I got married and moved to Raleigh, where I got a job teaching 6th grade Science.

Starting with Anticipation, this is my first time teaching 6th grade (I student taught/ interim taught 8th grade and then 7th grade) so I am looking forward to a new age group. I am also excited about the 6th grade Science curriculum which is focused primarily on the Earth Sciences, which are my favorite to learn about and study! We are at the end of week two and we have done two labs already. So far, my students really enjoy working together and are demonstrating great collaboration, critical thinking and communication. I anticipate more lab activities and the chance to incorporate more BYOD (which has been adopted county-wide) activities in our classroom. As the weeks progress I know I will have to mix up some of the student groupings (as the honeymoon phase wears off and personalities start to clash) but I am hopefully that this will result in students getting to know and work with more of their peers. There are at least five elementary schools that feed into this middle school, so many students are still trying to make friends.

I am feeling like I am in survival mode in regards to all of the extra "stuff" I am supposed to keep up with, create, file, document, etc. Oh man- when the professors said that the other stuff (PDP's, IEP meetings, whatever new teaching philosophy the school/county is focusing on) is what will take up more of your time then actually teaching- they were not kidding! All of the extra tasks and jobs they tack onto the classroom teacher can be overwhelming. I am really appreciative of all the experience I received through UNCA, student teaching with an amazing veteran teacher and starting a teaching job mid-year with an EC team. All of those experiences make me feel confident as I am planning the rest of the school year. 

I survived week one...

I survived week one! And if you're reading this, that must mean you did too! Congratulations, the first week of school is no easy task. I'm Caitlin and I teach Math to freshman and sophomores. I am super excited about this semester because I will actually be co-teaching Math 1 Honors with a colleague.  I am excited to see how we can better serve our students together as a team rather than all of the responsibility falling on just one of us. I don't have too much else to share about my classes just yet, so I'll share a goal I've set in order to feel more prepared each day and to feel less rushed going in to my 5th year of teaching.

I've set a personal goal for myself to just stay one week ahead. Sounds easy, right? Nope. I can remember my first couple years of teaching and how it was ALL I could do just to keep my head above water. Throw in changing schools, teaching a new course, and getting married... let's just say this didn't make it any easier. However, in order for my sanity to be saved I need to stay ahead.  Whether that's with lesson plans, creating new/supplemental material, or just making copies, it puts my stress level at ease knowing those things are already done. I feel prepared and confident when I walk into my classroom each day and I actually feel like I'm doing less work at home than I used to do.  I'm happy to say I've been successful thus far (week 2)... here's to hoping I can keep up with staying ahead in the weeks to come!

How do you lower your stress level? Have you mastered the art of staying ahead? I'd love to know what works for you!

Week 2: your story matters!

Lifted from middleschool2015-2016.blogspot.com

6. Your story matters. Consider the past, the present, and the future.

This we believe (NMSA, 2010).

*A shared vision developed by all stakeholders guides every decision. Shared Vision

Over the course of this journey, I realize how difficult it is for teachers to maintain their vision. Teaching takes a lot of physical and mental energy and sometimes we forget our calling, our purpose. We spend hours planning, implementing, assessing, and communicating with children, teammates, and parents. In addition, each year, schools are engaging in new technologies, new teaming configurations, new instructional designs, new initiatives, new grants and district tasks, that are often school-wide. How is it then, we can gain new knowledge about emerging strategies and practices, while meeting the needs of our students, planning authentic lessons and units, creating our own professional development plans, and finding ways to take care of ourselves and our families? I believe our passion and hope is not lost when we take time to reflect on what we are doing, on what has been done in the past, and to use our knowledge of the present to dream more about what we will do in the future.

More than 60 years ago, Dr. William Alexander, fondly known as the father of the middle school movement, addressed educators at “the 1963 Cornell Conference, …He prepared a speech proposing a new school called the middle school. His address, The Junior High School: A Changing View… provided a comprehensive rationale and program guidelines for the establishment of developmentally responsive middle schools” (Smith & McEwin, 2011, pgs 4-5). In 1973, the National Middle School Association was formed; and in 2011 outreach expanded to serve an international body of educators who serve students ages 10-15, currently known as the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE). Our focus continues to address the need for developmentally responsive middle schools.