Goal for Improvement!

I am planning on implementing my standards-based grading program again next year in Algebra 2 Concepts.  My goal is to find a better way to create an in progress grade for my students.

AGAPE - Relationships - The 3 Vs

Establishing relationships is not always an easy process.  One "a-ha" moment that I have come to over the years when it comes to relationships is that sometime they take a lot of time.  It might be required that one erode the defensive nature of someone with a particularly combative personality.  It might very well also be the case that a positive relationship is established with relative ease.  When it comes to the three Vs of value, vision, and voice I incorporate them into my class in the following ways.  I always make sure that my opinions and thoughts are known to my classes.  I will (very rarely) sugar coat things.  I feel that (again, most of the time) honesty is the best policy.  Students will rarely gain much from deception and dishonesty from figures of authority.  In this way, they learn that my values include honesty, and in the end, their best interests.  In the same sense, I think that it is important that students are able to share their own voice, when appropriate.  I like to lead by asking as many questions as possible.  Students are more likely to follow you down the path of educational enlightenment if they believe that they are a part of the process themselves.  While I know that we will ultimately be lead to a particular mathematical goal, it's necessary that the students are a part of the journey, not just along for the ride.  This also helps to foster positive relationships because students given their own opportunities to lead the educational process.  The remainder of the year for me is a the third trimester, which begins on Monday. It can sometimes feel like a vast expanse between now and the end of the school year.  I will sustain community first by being fully prepared for each lesson. I am teaching classes that I have taught before, so that should fairly manageable to do.  I will also make an effort to connect with a different student, in some manner, each day. I will attempt to connect with a different student each day so that I don't unintentionally play favorites.  I will use this same plan in the fall to create connections with new students.

AGAPE - Relationships

My plan is to try to enhance relationships between teachers in our school. Our school has progressively gotten bigger over the years that I have taught there, starting with around 800 students to its current 1100 students.  With an increase in students comes and increase in staffing, so there are many staff members that do not know each other very well.  In the past years I have encouraged a select group of staff members to participate in a social gathering that typically takes place after parent/teacher conferences, but I have kept that invitation to only those that I have some sort of personal connection with.  My goal is to open that invitation to all members of the staff so that those that may have previously felt disconnected from a larger group can be brought into the fold.  

Curricular Design – 21st Century Learning

I chose to try and implement an activity that required critical thinking and collaboration. I taught a lesson on vectors.  I gave students a very rudimentary understanding of what a vector is (a quantity that has both magnitude and direction) and how to use proper notation with describing a vector.  I think posed a few open ended questions about vectors such as How could you find the magnitude of a vector? and How could you find the direction angle of a vector? Both of these questions are related to concepts that we have studied throughout the trimester, so students should have been about the figure these problems out on their own.  I allowed students to work together in small groups to try and figure out a way to solve the problem.  It worked out just fine as at least one person in the group was able to figure it out and share that with his or her peers.  I would like to believe that this gave students a little more ownership of the content as they had to figure it out on their own.

AR Summary

I was very pleased with the results of my action research.  It showed that at the end of the trimester, my students that had struggled with math in the past showed some great gains and successes.  All of them, save for two, passed the course and many got the highest grade that they had ever attained in a math course.  This gives me encouragement to do this again in the future for the second half of the course in our third trimester.  A few questions that have come to me are:

• Will I still like standards-based grading by the end of the school year?
• Will I want to implement this into other courses?
• If I stop teaching the Algebra 2 Concepts class, will the next teacher continue to use standards based grading?

One Word plan

The "one word" that I chose to focus on was "dedication" particularly with regard to my family.  I'm pretty busy with school and school and also school that I wanted to make sure that I was making time to dedicate myself to enjoying the time I have available with my family. This was made possible a few weeks ago when my son got and ear infection, my daughter got pink eye, my wife got the flu, and everyone had fevers.  Except me.  For a period of a week I was a one-man crew that was blowing noses, making soups, administering medicines, and disinfecting everything.  It was a wild ride and I'm very glad that everyone is better.

The Spirit of Leadership

Concepts: Spirituality, Leadership

Enduring Understanding: It takes more than knowledge to be a teacher leader.

What does it mean to have a teacher's heart?  What is "teaching with heart?  What is spiritual teaching?

Read the article posted below: "The Spirit of Leadership".

Create a blog post in which you answer the following questions about your response to this article and connect it to your work with The Spiritual Dimension of Leadership by Houston and Sokolow.

• What are your initial thoughts about the idea that spirituality is the missing piece in the puzzle?
• My initial thought was that the author would be referring to spirituality in a religious sense.  Being a teacher in a non-parochial school, my initial reaction was to say to myself, "This article will have little bearing on my own experiences."  However, it was soon clear that the author was referring to "spiritual" development in terms of personal growth and team building, two ideas that I can get behind.

• Most teachers would want to avoid the pitfall of moving from compassion to callousness. One way to do this is to remember why you became a teacher in the first place. Briefly describe why you entered the teaching profession and mention any mentor who inspired or guided you.
• The person that I would say had the strongest influence on moving me into the career that I am is my dad.  My dad was an 8th grade science teacher for 37 years. I grew up knowing what the tasks of a teacher entailed.  I helped grade. I helped to set up labs over the weekend. In addition, my high school calculus teacher was a great influence on me because he showed me that you can be both a serious profession and kind of crazy, as long as you can pull it off.  I'm not sure if I'm pulling it off as well as he did, but I'm sure trying.

• The article concludes with the notion that the 21st Century is "the best time in history to be an educator".  Do you agree or disagree with this statement?  Why?
• With regard to the opportunities that are available for students, I would say that today is a fantastic time to be a teacher.  Access to technology has made learning occur in ways that it never did before.  Students can learn outside of the classroom. They can accomplish tasks in class in different ways than they were ever able to before.  On other side of the coin, the increase in technology has also lead to an increase in things that can cause distractions, both in and out of school.  Checking text messages in class is detrimental to learning.  Rampant cyber-bullying can be detrimental to personal growth.

• In what ways does your own notion of "spirituality" (not necessarily religious in nature) inform and affect your actions as a teacher in your own classroom and as a teacher leader among your peers?  On which of the 8 SDL principles do you rely most heavily?
• Of the 8 principles that were discussed, I would say that I rely most heavily on the idea of gratitude.  Being appreciate of those that have helped us to succeed is extremely important to me. Recently, my faith in humanity was restored when I had to unexpectedly sub for another math teacher's class when the substitute didn't show up.  I wasn't too excited to lose my prep period, but the sub wasn't there and somebody had to teach those kids, so, I begrudgingly took the class to my room.  Luckily, it was a lesson with which I was extremely familiar with and the teacher had some items ready for the sub to use.  What took my by surprise was that at the end of the lesson, when the class was leaving for lunch, I had several students thank me for teaching them that day.  As a high school teacher I don't regularly get students saying, "Thanks for teaching me some math today," but that's exactly what happened.  I was tremendous. 

January Research Journal

Now that I have had a chance to take a closer look at my data, I've noticed a couple of items that stand out pretty clearly:

• Students, in general, liked the way that the standards-based grading system worked.  They liked being able to reassess any of the learning targets they wanted to in order to show proficiency.
• Students, in general, didn't like that they were not able to see what their grade was at any particular time as they could in their other classes.  This wasn't feasible for me to do because their total grade was an amalgamation of several different factors that wasn't easy to calculate on a regular basis.  Next time I will look at having a set date where students would be able to get a snapshot of what their current grade is.
• Students final grades are, in general, higher in this class than they would be in a traditional math class.  I'm torn as to whether this is "good" or "bad".  If all grades are better, than students are clearly succeeding more, which is good, but is the letter grade that I have assigned to a particular score appropriate?  I'm still not totally sure.

Final Stage 2

Here is a link to my final stage 2.

Bullying

My school does not have an anti-bullying program specifically.  There are some loose ideas that go around out there (there has been a "design an anti-bullying t-shirt" program and other minor things,) but there is not over-arching program to speak off.  There is a paragraph, or two, in the student handbook that describes, in generalities, that bullying is not allowed, discouraged, etc.  If bullying does arise, it is the responsibility of the teacher or staff member that sees any sort of bullying occur to report the incident to the office.  What the office might do from there is dependent upon the incident that occurred and the severity of the offense. 

In order to try to prevent bullying in my room, and hopefully then in the building as a whole, I demonstrate through my words and actions that each student is deserving of respect and should not be subject to any sort of emotional distress, of any degree.  I show them that they are in a climate in which they can feel safe and know that the belong.  I try to make myself as visible as possible in the hall ways and during lunch time when things such as bullying can occur. 

Dots and Have Nots Part Deux

Unfortunately my student, previously identified as "Voltron" has left our building for the alternative learning center in our district.  So, it was pretty tough to complete the second portion of this blog entry.  However, I am happy to think in terms of hypotheticals, so I have answered the questions below in a hypothetical sense.  If "Voltron" was still in the building and I was still having interactions with him or her on a regular basis, here's what I think would probably be happening.

• What actions are you taking?
• At this point I have upped the ante, so to speak, and started putting more pressure on "Voltron". As previously mentioned "Voltron" is not a strong math student and is one that is prone to doing little during any time possible.  Now that "Voltron" and I are on a more friendly level, it is easier for me to be more forceful when it comes to getting "Voltron" to do the work. 
• What impact are you having?
• It's going great because I'm such a great teacher/person/individual in this great hypothetical world that I've created for myself!
• What questions are being generated?
• If this world is hypothetical, what's even real any more?  Am I real?  Does "Voltron" even exist?  Are we all "Voltron"?

Vision/Missions/Values

The group I have selected to go through this process with my math department which is also my PLC.

• Vision:  Create unified approach to our curriculum.
• Mission:  Work together in a profession manner.
• Values:  Cooperation, communication, understanding that it won't happen right away, respect for others' ideas.

Which parts of the process were easy?  Difficult?  How did your embrace these parts? 
     We do not always teach the same way, but for the most part we have similar beliefs about what is important to teach our students.  We are also all on the same page in the sense that we do not have to do everything exactly the same, but that the broach strokes should be the same for all of us. 

What did you learn about yourself during this process?
     I can be both the person that thinks outside of the box and the person that is very set in his ways. 

What did you learn about others?
     There are some members that came up with ideas that I never would have thought of myself.

What were missed opportunities?
     Due to the constant scheduling and requirements that our administration puts on our PLC time we don't have as much time as would like (or need) to complete what we would like.

How would you amend (change) the process in the future?
     With more time I know that we can get closer and closer to our goals!