The 2015 USF Inquiry Conference was a tremendous success. Dr. Darby was an incredible key note speaker and true testament to exactly how powerful and revolutionizing teacher inquiry can be, not only for the researcher, but the students, the school, and the community. It was awe inspiring to see so many teacher candidates sharing their hard work and dedication to solving a problem that they identified with and had a passion to try and solve. My partner and I presented on our inquiry and go to share our passion for preventing preservice teacher burn out. I'm so honored to say that I have participated in two inquiry cycles all before becoming a classroom teacher. It is my goal to continue teacher research as an inservice teacher. I know that the power for change starts with me and the voices of my students. My inquiry journey does not stop here!
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The transition from being a student teacher can heighten feelings of extreme excitement and intense feelings of inferiority. Its a strange conundrum to be in when you don't know what you don't know. From what I've heard its all about survival mode your first year in the classroom. The flight or flight feeling is something i've become familiar with this past semester. I'm overjoyed when I think about my classroom, wherever that may be, for the 2015-2016 school year. I'm ready to set up my classroom, meet my student, get to know my parents, and build a community of learning. I know that the Urban Teacher Residency Partnership Program and all of its stakeholders have supported me and guided me to the place that I am today and I am equipped and ready to navigate any ind of terrain that i'm faced with.
Similar to any adult, students love and thrive off of having a purpose and motivation for learning. I've noticed that not all students have that internal drive to learn, so if students buy into what you are teaching them and view it as something they what to know more about or work hard towards attaining, you will have a class full of knowledge hungry students. As we recently entered life science, my students are learning about plants and their basic parts and necessities. Over the next month my students will be researching and becoming experts on plant parts, how a plant grows, and what plants need to grow. In turn, they will then have the opportunity to grow a plant to bring home to their mothers for Mother's Day. This week we are starting our research on plant parts. By learning what each plant part does for the growth and support of plants, students will understand the varieties of plants and the fundamental functions of each part. Each student is recording their research from a collection of library books in a foldable and their science notebook. As they read the text, they record their new learning using notes, pictures and diagrams and share their findings with their fellow researchers at their table groups. By integrating literacy into science, students are able to be exposed to science vocabulary and practice synthesizing and communicating information from various texts. Through to the end of the week we will continue to explore the parts of the plant by exploring edible plants, such as common fruits and vegetables. I've noticed that my students are more engaged when they are given a purpose, are able to freely express themselves and work collaboratively with their peers.
With only 27 days until graduation, I'm reminded of how fast this experience has seemed to have passed by. Its already been two years in the UTRPP program and I can honestly say that I will be walking away with a priceless education and hopefully a job. My teaching opportunities have strengthened my ability to assess my students needs based on data that I've collected, plan lessons that support and engage student centered learning and assess students comprehension and understanding for future lessons. All of these things have been part of my FEAP goals that I've been tracking throughout the program. It is pretty amazing to know where I was in August of last year and where my thoughtful goal setting and support has taken me. There is always a lot to learn in education, the times are always changing, thus educators and others alike must be flexible and adaptive.
As I have taken on more responsibilities in the classroom I have quickly learned how important it is to have a plan, but the name of the game is being flexible. It doesn’t go unrecognized that the teaching profession has one of the highest turnover rates amongst new teachers. One also doesn’t have to be told that the job of an educator is one that is both demanding and under-appreciated. There are many known factors that contribute to the feelings of burnout and fatigue in teaching.These feelings are more commonly thought of and spoken of amongst in-service teachers, however, contrary to popular belief, pre-service teachers are highly susceptible to the same burnout effects during their internship. Fimian and Blanton said it best, “Student teachers are in a precarious position in that their knowledge of pedagogy and child development is still naive, and they are asked to work in ambiguous situations that require them to be both ‘‘student’’ and ‘‘teacher’’ (Fimian & Blanton, 1987).” Student teachers commonly experience and cope with self imposed high expectations, a heightened desire to achieve a sense of positive self efficacy, stressful learning environments, and collaborating teacher relationships.
In the midst of the first semester as a final year residents, I became aware of a shift in attitude, motivation, and health due to the perceived pressures and expectations of our program. Though independently working to cope with these problems, I eventually realized this experience of “burnout” was not unique, but felt broadly throughout our program. We hold a personal value of maintaining good mental and emotional health, and feel that incorporating that into our professional career is something that is very important and worth looking into. The goal of my inquiry is to support current and future pre-service teachers that may experience similar circumstances by providing resources and strategies. Our data shows that residents are stressed and feel the effects of their schools environments. The USF counseling centers resources and seminar and critical friend groups showed to be beneficial resources and interventions to cope with the stresses and demands of being a pre-service teacher As graduates of the UTRPP, it is our hope to see the residency programs, and others alike, set in place preventative support for preservice teachers with the intention to help maintain a healthy mental and emotional health and professional self-efficacy. Thus, preservice teacher burnout rates will ideally be lowered and first and second year teachers graduating from teacher preparation programs will enter the classroom having had appropriate support and strategies for coping with the stresses of the teaching profession. Are we teaching students how to read or are we teaching them how to read a text and answer the questions with a passing score? This is the question that I have been pondering this week while teaching and planning for literacy. With testing fast approaching most of our literacy focus is on preparing for reading and comprehending long passages of text and answering questions for comprehension. When I ask myself whats best for the students I know that its not just for them to know how to have the stamina to read for a test. I would rather teach my students how readers use a text and their strategies to better understand any text. This past week in literacy my students go to read an informational text to review text features and learn how text features help readers better understand a text. We read a text called "A Tree Is Growing" and we used the information that we gathered from the text and the non-fiction features and organized our learning on a diagram of a tree. This allowed my students to see how readers put their understanding of the text with their deepened understanding from the text features onto a simple diagram of a tree to show their comprehension of the text. I have learned that my students need strategies to use anytime they are reading.
This week I started to put up our daily objectives on the board to keep me and my students accountable to our learning goals for the day. It is my goal to have the students take as much ownership of their learning as possible and for me to lead them to the point where they can answer the essential question after every lesson. This is a discipline that teachers often do because its required, but I see the meaning and value behind having this on the board and an important talking piece within your instruction. More and more I'm finding myself asking myself if I'm where I need to be professionally. When I ponder this question for any length of time I always end up with the same conclusion. Todd Whitaker, author of What Great Teachers Do Differently (the book I am currently reading in my book club), said it best: "Education is extremely complex, and so is classroom teaching." Being in my third grade classroom with my students from 7:30-3:30 everyday is the most challenging and rewarding thing i've been faced with professionally. Learning to be flexible, patient, proactive and effective has been one of the biggest take aways from this year. This career never claims to be consistent, its constantly changing and evolving, It was during a conversation with one of my university supervisors last week that I realized that contrary to previous conversations about my field experience, I was talking to her about concerns and my students learning, well being and futures. My supervisor said to me that according to research there is a specific part in a preservice teachers growth when they start talking about their concerns for their students, when speaking about their field experience, rather than the concerns for themselves. I know that education is where I'm being called to serve.
On Tuesday the Tampa business partners, UTRPP residents, and other volunteers came together to judge the k-5 STEM fair projects at the Tampa Convention Center. I was paired with educators in the community and business partners to judge 5th grade engineering projects. This was such an enlightening experience. Walking around talking to students about their projects and the process that they went through to get to where they were was so amazing. The students were able to articulate why they chose to do their experiment, what their conclusion their data lead them to and how it affects the real world. Having the opportunity to work with my third grade class through the STEM fair project process I know that it really does teach students the many possible scientific processes that scientist go through to find answers to questions they have about the real world. It was so rewarding to see one of my students from one of the groups from my class that got to go onto the STEM fair. The biggest take away was seeing future scientists from all grades talking about doing science. As teachers we have a hand in nurturing that passion in our students. Monday was the day that I introduced Design Challenge Mondays to my students. My intentions for starting this was to make sure that my students were getting exposure to the design process that engineers and other scientist go through in the real world and to set a goal to teach science through Inquiry Mondays and Design Challenges every Monday, which can be challenging on a early release day.
We kicked off the lesson with a short discussion of what an engineer is and followed that up with the third grade design challenge video. We discussed one of the scientific methods that engineers can follow and how engineers sometimes get jobs through something called a request for proposal. I shared with my third graders our request for proposal from NASA and broke down what it meant for them as engineers for the next couple of weeks. Next Monday we will start to fill out our design challenge planning sheet and create a plan for our tower that NASA wants our class of engineers to design and build. In order to collect data for this goal to improve my science instruction, I recorded my lesson and took anecdotal notes while watching my lesson. I watched my lesson back with the intentions to watch for my students engagement and my ability to lead my students to understanding the design challenge process. My accountability partner and I discussed my data and the lesson and what I would do differently and where I'm going to go with my instruction next week. If I were to do Mondays introduction lesson again I would have my students record their learning about the design process that engineers follow to close out the lesson and have data to know where the students were at the conclusion of the lesson. Next Monday I will start my lesson with an opportunity to assess my students on what they know about the design process and how that will help them solve problems. I intend on continuing to develop my practice in science through daily instruction with a focus on inquiry/design on Mondays. I can continue this goal into literacy by having a day out of the week where I focus on providing my students with specific instruction on a skill or strategy in literacy. Last week third grade started to introduce two "hiking to success" testing strategies and give a practice reading assessment to show growth with comprehension and stamina. I will collect the data from my students assessments every friday to see if direct instruction on test taking strategies shows improvement in my students test scores. According to my students, "science is everything that you DO!" Im so excited to do science with them on Mondays through design challenges. Students will be introduced to the design process through a hands-on activity to build a tall lightweight tower that will support a space probe. On Monday I will introduce the design challenge process of Engineering and the use of the design planning sheet. We will discuss what an engineer is and what the process that engineers use to solve problems. Implementing these design challenges in my classroom every Monday is one of my goals for my science content coaching rotation. I will be collecting data to demonstrate that I met this goal. The data that I will collect will be video recordings of my lessons, student work samples, and anecdotal notes of students' conversations.
My other goal for the semester is to include nature of science standards in every science lesson plan and follow through with implementing the NOS standards in the activities and discussions. The data that I will be collecting is my lesson plans with the NOS standards, and recordings of my lessons with static coding sheets to monitor my questioning and student discussions. |
Ms. OlsonLevel III Resident | Senior | USF | UTRPP Archives
April 2015
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