Finding time is hard. I always knew teachers were busy people, but I figured I could carve out time each week to keep blogging when I started last spring. It's been harder than I expected - clearly, since I haven't posted since April of last year! A (belated) new year's resolution: keep blogging. Use it as time to reflect, focus, and hone my teaching skills since I'm only in my second full year of teaching in the U.S.
I'm working on revamping my website somewhat to include more recent lessons and finally finish updating all the other under construction pages, but realistically, I know a lot of that still won't happen. With 3 preps, responsibilities as Freshman Class Dean, wedding planning, and trying to maintain some life outside of teaching, some of those pages will still be under construction for a while to come (maybe in some ways reminiscent of the actual construction projects I have in my neighborhood right now, too).
Based on my recent discussion posts and poll updates, it's clear that I'm thinking a lot about group work right now. For IB MYP (Middle Years Program) Unit Plans, we have to focus more concretely on teaching different approaches to learning and skills beyond the typical content-based standards. I love group work, collaboration, and team building - in real life and in the classroom. I think it's an essential set of skills that everyone needs to succeed in life. However, I'm not entirely sure how to teach it. I put students in groups, offer different levels of scaffolding (specific assignments for each person in the group, for example), and use a group evaluation tool as part of their grade for the assignment. But I don't know how to explicitly teach this.
Maybe it's a matter of spending more time at the start of the course building relationships with students and amongst students as a group. I can remember a course I took for my Masters that included both undergraduates and graduate students, and we all had to talk about serious issues and work together a lot. The professors spent significant amounts of class time having us play seemingly silly games - Mingle Mingle, dancing around the room, etc. This was all done to help build a community - and they were willing to sacrifice content and time to do so.
I know I need to do a better job of building that classroom community. I struggled with it with my 7th graders especially last semester, and across the board, I need to be more focused on building that community from the start. Yet, I'm still not sure if that was explicitly teaching collaboration. It built relationships, which are essential for collaboration, but there never explicit instructions about how.
Maybe it's modeling and leading by example. This course had 3 professors who co-taught together every week, so they could actually model and explicitly talked about how they came to decisions and what they were doing as a group of professors (in front of us). This was eye-opening because so few professors co-teach, let alone tell students when and how they're thinking through the approach to the course. But would middle or high school students catch on to that? Or how would it have to be amended to make it clear to them? And how can I do this when I am usually the only teacher in the room?
Evidently, I've still got a lot of questions, and I'm not quite sure how to best move forward on this one. I'll keep thinking and trying to develop something specific for my 8th graders who will have some sort of group project (or maybe two) coming up in the next month.
I'm working on revamping my website somewhat to include more recent lessons and finally finish updating all the other under construction pages, but realistically, I know a lot of that still won't happen. With 3 preps, responsibilities as Freshman Class Dean, wedding planning, and trying to maintain some life outside of teaching, some of those pages will still be under construction for a while to come (maybe in some ways reminiscent of the actual construction projects I have in my neighborhood right now, too).
Based on my recent discussion posts and poll updates, it's clear that I'm thinking a lot about group work right now. For IB MYP (Middle Years Program) Unit Plans, we have to focus more concretely on teaching different approaches to learning and skills beyond the typical content-based standards. I love group work, collaboration, and team building - in real life and in the classroom. I think it's an essential set of skills that everyone needs to succeed in life. However, I'm not entirely sure how to teach it. I put students in groups, offer different levels of scaffolding (specific assignments for each person in the group, for example), and use a group evaluation tool as part of their grade for the assignment. But I don't know how to explicitly teach this.
Maybe it's a matter of spending more time at the start of the course building relationships with students and amongst students as a group. I can remember a course I took for my Masters that included both undergraduates and graduate students, and we all had to talk about serious issues and work together a lot. The professors spent significant amounts of class time having us play seemingly silly games - Mingle Mingle, dancing around the room, etc. This was all done to help build a community - and they were willing to sacrifice content and time to do so.
I know I need to do a better job of building that classroom community. I struggled with it with my 7th graders especially last semester, and across the board, I need to be more focused on building that community from the start. Yet, I'm still not sure if that was explicitly teaching collaboration. It built relationships, which are essential for collaboration, but there never explicit instructions about how.
Maybe it's modeling and leading by example. This course had 3 professors who co-taught together every week, so they could actually model and explicitly talked about how they came to decisions and what they were doing as a group of professors (in front of us). This was eye-opening because so few professors co-teach, let alone tell students when and how they're thinking through the approach to the course. But would middle or high school students catch on to that? Or how would it have to be amended to make it clear to them? And how can I do this when I am usually the only teacher in the room?
Evidently, I've still got a lot of questions, and I'm not quite sure how to best move forward on this one. I'll keep thinking and trying to develop something specific for my 8th graders who will have some sort of group project (or maybe two) coming up in the next month.