Blog Post #14 - Teaching Can Be a Profession

For this blog post, we were asked to read an article by Joel Klein titled Teaching Our Children Can Be a Profession. In this article, Mr. Klein points out several factors holding teachers back from reaching their fullest potential as professionals. He also sites previous teachers union leader, Albert Shanker and some of his thoughts. The following is a brief synopsis of each issue and his proposed solution.

Lack of Education

In my opinion, this is true of the teaching profession today. Many people opt to pursue a career in elementary education because it is "an easy degree." While the course work may not be extremely challenging (especially for someone who excelled in school or who spends a lot of time around children), it is certainly a job to be taken seriously. Klein specifically points out the lack of knowledge in the areas of teaching math and reading. These are areas in which students most frequently struggle, and the problem is that, most likely, the teacher also struggled during his or her early education. This is why Klein suggests that we recruit our educators from the top third of graduates ensuring that each one has a firm grasp of the subject matter at hand. This sounds ideal until you think about it. I can remember as a student I always found it easier to help or be helped by my peers - someone who struggled and then figured it out. Many times, those people have a better way of explaining concepts. They can speak more on your level and break things down more easily. I think Klein hit the nail on the head in the beginning by saying we need to focus more on HOW to teach these hard-to-grasp concepts to our students.

Ease of Becoming a Teacher

Klein also points out that our society has made it too easy to become a teacher. This has positive and negative effects. Right now, anyone who has obtained a bachelor's degree is eligible to teach. It's that easy. How many times have you heard someone say something like, "I don't know what I'll do when I retire. Maybe I'll just teach." or "I can always use my history/art/English degree to teach if nothing else."? Why is this profession constantly viewed as an escape route or backup plan? I'll tell you why. The degree is not incredibly challenging. The perks (nights, weekends, holidays, and summers) are enticing. If you can just stick it out for ten years, you are virtually invincible. And finally, retirement comes much earlier. You only have to give 25 years of service, regardless of age, in order to retire with the state of Alabama. The main things pushing people away from education is working with children and the pay. It's tough to find a solution because many highly-qualified people will choose another profession looking for more money. However, finding the money to increase teacher pay is a whole new problem.

Seniority-based Reward System

I touched on this in the previous section. Once teachers have become vested, meaning they have contributed ten years of service, they are almost untouchable. They can do the bare minimum and receive no lasting consequences. It is virtually impossible to fire a vested teacher. Klein suggests a performance-based reward system rather than a seniority-based one. Shanker goes a step further.  "He proposed that teachers establish their own board to police the profession, establishing standards and providing mechanisms for removing incompetent teachers. Teachers would also be subjected to merit-based career ladders and would be
promoted based on specialty exams." I think this is an excellent idea. Teachers should be rewarded or reprimanded, hired or fired based on one thing only: how they perform their job. I'm not saying a teacher with failing students should be fired. There are other ways to evaluate job performance. Parent, student, and even coworker surveys would be a start. Principals could even look at how well students perform in the next grade to evaluate their preparedness.

In conclusion, if we as teachers want to be regarded as true professionals, we need to act like professionals, taking pride in all we do. As Klein said, excellence should be our guide. In achieving school admission, in our personal coursework, and in the way we run our classrooms, there should always be one common thread: excellence. The change has to start with us.

C4K Summary - November

My first C4K this month was fun! Mikayla wrote about her Halloween plans for this year. She is a fifth grade student in Oakville, Ontario Canada. She plans to go trick-or-treating with her friend, Marina. While they are collecting candy, they also plan to ask for donations of canned goods. She had written in orange and black text for Halloween, which I thought was a very creative idea. Since I commented the day after Halloween, I told her that I hoped she had a fun time, and I asked her how many cans she was able to collect.

My next C4K for November was on the blog of an 8th grade student in Iowa named Anna. She did a project where she had to create her own print. She chose to begin with a picture of a model. Printmaking is tricky because you have to carve out the negative space instead of drawing a picture. She essentially created a stamp. Her finished product looks great, but I was most impressed with her attitude. She cut herself twice while carving out her print, but she concluded that in the end it was worth it to see her final product. She felt a sense of pride in having completed her piece and having completed it well. This is something that I hope to find with all of the projects I assign as a teacher. Successfully completing a project should make students feel good about themselves. 

Project #12B - Greater Than, Less Than, Equal

For Project 12B, Group 8 decided to do a lesson on greater than, less than, and equal geared towards kindergarteners.

Blog Post #13 - What Did I Leave Out?

For this post, Dr. Strange asked us to write a blog post concerning our own field of study. I am an Elementary Education major, so I will be teaching many subjects. For this reason, my post is concerning technology and the rush for schools to go 1:1. 

The Assignment

Many schools are rushing to be the first (or the best) to go 1:1. This means that they will provide one laptop or iPad for each student in their school. Read Why Schools Must Move Beyond One-to-One Computing, and write a response to this article. If you are lucky enough to work in a school that has gone 1:1, how would you ensure that the technology your school provides is utilized effectively and not simply as a replacement for pencil and paper?

My Blog Post

This is a great article about a side of this discussion that I never really thought about. Every school wants to be on top of the technology game, but what does that really mean? Almost every classroom in Mobile has a SMARTboard, and now the race is to have iPads in the hands of every student. Who will do it first? And does that make one school better than another academically? Maybe. Teachers, administrators, and even parents need to consider what these devices are being used for. There is great potential for learning when each child has his or her own device, but they shouldn't be, as Alan November calls them, "$1,000 pencils."

If I am fortunate enough to work in a 1:1 school, I would love to implement a learning management system called Schoology in my classroom. I may use it anyways as an online supplement for home use. Schoology works as a central hub for the classroom. Using this tool, I could post assignments, grades, quizzes, and media such as audio or video. Everything is available for students, parents and even other teachers to see. This would be another piece of my Personal Learning Network as well as a beginning for the networks of my young students. Through Schoology, I can also give individual feedback to my students and track their success to see what works and what doesn't. I also like that it integrates Google Docs, Turn It In, and other sites so that everything is in one place. This will make it easier for me as a teacher and more organized for my students who will be using all of these resources. Finally, I love that schoology has iOS and Android apps available for both phones and tablets. This way, students can see their classwork from home. It will especially be useful when students miss a day of school. Below are some short videos about the uses for Schoology.

Project #10 - Interview Movie with Sara Martin

Interview with Sara Martin, a math teacher at Davidson High School in Mobile, Alabama

C4T #3 - Will Richardson

My third C4T is on the blog of Will Richardson.He is an educator, an author, and a speaker. He says in his bio that he is trying to answer the question, "What happens to schools and classrooms and learning in a 2.0 world?" The first post that I read is titled We Need Discoverers. In this post, Mr. Richardson takes an excerpt from David Edwards' American Schools are Training Kids for a World That Doesn't Exist. This is a fascinating article about how the world around us is changing, and we need to discover new ways to survive in it. Edwards says that there is a disconnect between learning and doing in our culture. You go to school and learn how to be a doctor, lawyer, chef, engineer, etc. and then once you graduate, you get to do it. This disconnect is simply not functional within our society. So how do we teach our students to become discoverers? I believe that one of the best ways to do this is through PBL. In PBL, students are given a problem and challenged to discover the solution. These are the types of professionals that we need. We cannot move forward in the areas of technology, medicine, agriculture, etc without people who are willing to discover new and better solutions. The article written by David Edwards would make an excellent prompt for future blog posts in EDM 310.

Mr. Richardson's next blog post was another excerpt, this time from Gary Stager. Stager predicts that the amount of time students spend in school will decrease, potentially to nothing. I'm not sure if I agree with Stager, but there certainly has to be some sort of shift. The comment section of this post is where the conversation really gets started. One reader suggested that as long as parents need glorified babysitting while they're at work, schools will continue to monopolize our children's time. Another pointed out that government assisted families will continue to send their children to school for free food and access to technology. That comment seems a bit far fetched. I pointed out that the incidence of children who are home schooled has steadily increased over the past decade. I believe a shift like this is most likely to pull students out of the traditional school setting. However, I tend to agree most with Mr. Richardson's comment that schools will still exist, but what the children are doing in the schools will change.

Blog Post #12 - What assistive technologies are available to you as a teacher?

Google Slides Presentation

Assistive Technology Videos

Assistive Technology Articles

Blog Post #11 - What Can We Learn About Teaching and Learning From These Teachers?

Back to the Future

Brian Crosby is doing incredible things with his classes. I was completely shocked to hear that the majority of his fourth grade students didn't know what city they lived in. That could be incredibly discouraging for a teacher, but he didn't let that hold him or his students back. Instead, he gave them every opportunity to become engaged in their learning. The main thing that I took from this video was to never stop looking for opportunities that could make a lesson exciting. Throughout this course, it has become clear to me that PBL is the best, most effective way to teach. However, I probably would have stopped at crushing the coke can or sending the tissue paper into the sky. Mr. Crosby continued with his lessons. He didn't stop with one project or one cool introduction into the lesson. He even incorporated other subjects into this lesson. That was so smart to me. Learning about the earth's atmosphere already had the attention of his class. There was no need to find another "need to know" or attention grabber. He simply needed to gear his writing projects more towards his science lesson.

Blended Learning Cycle

Paul Anderson is applying a Blended Learning Cycle in his science class. In this method, students go through a series of steps throughout the lesson. They cannot advance to the next step until they have "mastered" the one they are on. The steps are laid out as the acronym QUIVERS (QUestion, Investigation/Inquiry, Video, Elaboration, Review, Summary Quiz). What I found most interesting was that Mr. Anderson sits down with each student during the Review to check their understanding before they move on to the summary quiz. Getting that kind of attention from a teacher is rare, and I'm sure it has had a huge effect on his students' learning. This is an interesting approach. I'm interested to try it out with other age groups and other subjects.

Making Thinking Visible

In this video, Mark Church gets his students thinking about the origin of the human species. They are asked to get into groups and discuss this topic, then create a headline that sums up the question. That is a great idea in itself, but I like his plan for the future even better. He plans to continue with the unit for the next two weeks and then go back and look at their headlines. He will ask them to create new headlines, and then discuss how their thinking has changed.

Sam Pane 4th Grade

This was such a fun project! I'm interested to know what program he used for the comic book creator. You can tell the students enjoyed this project by looking at the show of hands when Mr. Pane asked for a volunteer to share their comic. I can't remember a time when an entire class was eager to share out loud! I also really like his idea of a Gallery Walk. This allowed for a peer review, but it left the option open for them to look at anyone's work. The peer reviews I remember doing always started something like "Pass your paper to the person behind you..." This was a great way to teach fourth graders about digital responsibility.

Project Based Learning

This is an interesting idea. I completely agree that there are many instances where literature and history overlap. To fully understand most literary pieces, we have to have an understanding of what was happening in the world at that time. If the time period being covered in both classes overlap, then combining these two courses is a no-brainer. We have seen over and over again that computer/technology courses can be integrated with almost any subject. I really like this idea. It would help me personally to relate to both the literature and the history being studied.

Roosevelt Elementary's PBL Program

Roosevelt Elementary School has taken it upon themselves to use project based learning throughout the entire school. That is an incredible undertaking, and I'm sure it requires a lot of work. There are some excellent benefits to a program like this. Project Based Learning is a great way to gauge students' understanding of a topic. Oral presentations help to curb the fear of public speaking at a young age. Project Based Learning also gives opportunity for curriculum integration. Curriculum integration is discussing a topic in more than one class or subject. This is the best way to show real world applications. One lesson or idea can be relevant across several different disciplines. My favorite part of this video was the parent interviews. It is incredible to see parents who are so excited about what and how their children are learning. Many times it is hard to gain the support of parents when trying something new. Roosevelt Elementary School is doing a great job implementing PBL across the board.

Project #14 - Group 8

For our Project Based Lesson Plan, we decided to do a lesson on weather for third grade students. They will research and learn about predicting and preparing for extreme weather events. We will also chart the weather each day on a simple bar graph to integrate what we are learning in math.

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