Standard 3 – Educators understand and apply knowledge of student growth and development
Not all students learn the same way, just as not all teachers teach the same, and thank goodness, because I imagine the world would be quite boring if it was all the same. I found myself with a not so chatty group of students during my last Practicum, in a class that I was hoping would have a lot of discussion. As I debated ways to try and have more well rounded discussion and not just the same students, short of cold calling on members of the class, which I was sure would not create the environment that I was hoping to. I spoke to another educator and expressed that I had a quite group, but highly engaged in the content as demonstrated by written responses, ink-sheds and short answers, but I was hoping for this engagement to be expressed in some sort of dialogue. The other educator and I had a discussion about TQE’s (Thoughts, Questions, & Epiphanies) and also Table-Top Twitter. I expressed that my students had been sharing questions and thoughts about the novel we were studying in the novel tracking package that I had given them; within the package were spots for students to draw, make connections, ask questions and they were coming up with great questions.
So here is what happened, I went through the tracking booklets with the class and then asked a variety of students for permission to use one of their questions in an upcoming class. Then I grabbed poster paper and wrote the questions in the middle. I made an example and then we were ready to dive in. Well, big toe in the water dive-in. I realized that I would need to explain what was a well thought out answer could look like and explain why we were doing this activity.
The activity started with a conversation, and a question, “did everyone know what Twitter was?” From there I went over a few ‘ground rules’. 1) Please make sure your handle (@whomever) does not change as you move through the questions or I will be really confused. 2) Please make sure you respond to peers constructively. 3) Please carefully read the question to see what it is asking. 4) Please let your writing do the talking, if we are all talking during this activity it will be very overwhelming. I then used my handy Popsicle sticks to create groups and the Tweeting began. When it was over, the class and I had a discussion about the process, how they felt, what they liked or what they did not like, what might be better changed, whether they would want to do something like this Table-Top Twitter again.
Overall the response was positive, students pointed out that they were more comfortable taking part in ‘discussion’ this way versus having to do it out-loud. They commented that they would want to do it again, but would like more time to work on the questions (our groups had been rotating on a timer, but as more and more responses were being written it was taking longer to read and then respond); this was fantastic feedback for me.
I had a fairly grade driven group of students for this Practicum, many were planning post-secondary and technical schooling after graduation and so there was a desire to do well academically in order to be setup for schooling in September. With that in mind, I modified and added to a rubric for grading essays that had been shared by a senior teacher in the district. The final product broke down all of the pieces of the essay that the students would be writing when our novel study was completed and hoe based on the rubric they would be assessed. By breaking down each section of the essay and explaining what was being assessed students were able to have a clear picture of what was expected of them.
However, this also led to some new understanding, in terms of what I needed to teach. I discovered that while putting together an essay made sense to the majority of my students, integrating supporting quotations and creating a strong thesis did not, so this led to additional lessons. This was good though, it allowed me to modify the things that I was teaching to meet my students where they were at.