What a month it's been! Getting into my classroom, meeting my students, establishing my procedures, getting my feet under me. Teaching is a wild ride, but I am so satisfied, it's almost hard to believe. I never thought I would be so happy with something I'm also getting paid for.
My only complaint so far is simply that I had so little warning and time for preparation before the semester started. They brought me on a week before classes started, and of that, I had only three days on site. The room I was supposed to use was still completely set up for a completely different teacher and a completely different subject--and no one was available to help me move all the things out of that room. So I spent all three days moving that teacher's stuff to another room and cleaning my room so I could use it. I didn't even have time to set it up properly after cleaning it, let alone plan my curriculum for the year.
As a result, I've been playing catch-up since then, and my students have paid the price. Instead of having a really solid plan, I've been only one-step ahead of the game. Or, as another new teacher in my class put it, "We're one step ahead of our students in a book we haven't read." Only now do I feel like I'm slowly starting to pull ahead of them. This is the first week I've had a real plan, and it's already feeling so much better.
Some observations...
On Timing
One thing I've realized is that 45 minutes is both less and more than it seems. Over 5 days, that comes to less than 4 hours. With no homework, those 3 hours and 45 minutes are all I get over an entire week. It's not a lot of time. As such, a lot of the activities I planned for to start with took longer than I would have liked. What I wanted to take 1-2 weeks ended up taking 3-4.
Part of this I think is related to what I talked about above: I didn't have a good plan. Without knowing what the next step is that you're striving towards, there's not much incentive to move briskly to get there. Instead, the incentive (subtle and unconscious though it may be) was for me to prolong activities and allow them to drag out, in order to buy myself more time to plan the next step. I don't like being in that position.
On Preliminary Assessments
So I have this idea I'm striving to bring into my classroom, which is to grade students based on accomplishment, not compliance and paperwork. The model I'm working with is that there are a half dozen areas I'm grading them in (Reading Mechanics, Reading Strategies, Writing Mechanics, Writing Strategies, Listening, and Speaking). My activities so far have oriented around doing preliminary assessments in each of those categories to determine their current skill level. (Those preliminary assessments are what took way-the-hell-too-long, and I will definitely strive for a faster way to complete them if I do this again in the future.)
So the big idea is that at the end of the semester, I can assess them again in each of those categories, and grade them based on their improvement.
This runs into a few challenges in practical application. First, students want regular progress reports. They like to know how well they are doing. Second, the school has a transient population, with new students entering and old students leaving on a semi-regular basis. I won't always have the preliminary assessments for every student to compare the final, summative assessments to, and in other cases, someone who took the preliminary assessments won't be around for the finals at the end.
The model I've landed on is this: I'll give regular activities in class a small amount of set points, for "participation" as much as anything else. These things are treated as formative assessments, so there's no penalty in grading if they "get it wrong." Instead, errors are treated only as opportunities for further learning--road signs, if you will, for me as the teacher, pointing me which direction I need to take the class. Then at the end, the summative assessments will be applied, compared to the students original scores in all these areas, and a comparatively quite large amount of points can then be obtained for demonstrated improvement in the six key skills.
I hope this will provide the best of both worlds. For students who are not present for both 'bookends' of assessment at the beginning and end of the semester, the regular small amount of points applied for everyday activities can serve as their grade. But for students who are here throughout the semester, I can apply my system and grade them based on measurable progress that they have made. Furthermore, I still have something I can show my students for progress reports, and even though those scores are just participation points, I believe the score is still meaningful, because honestly, I don't see how one would improve without participating in the key learning activities. I expect to find that participation scores will map quite reliably to improvement scores over the course of the semester.
On Planning
As I mentioned above, this week is the first time I've felt that I have a real plan in advance, and it makes a profound difference. I still haven't had time to plan for all four preps through the whole week, so I've still got some work to do on the later half of the week, but today I knew exactly what I was doing all day. Whenever I am prepared, I can feel how much more smoothly it goes.
The other thing I'm doing, that's hard to do without a solid plan in advance, is writing in transitions halfway through each period. When I have time to plan in advance, I can include two activities in the plan, and I know at the beginning of the period that I need to move the first activity along smoothly in order to have time for the second. This cuts down on the amount of time that I let slide by, getting distracted by the students or trying to corral them into whatever the activity for the day is. I'm not sure why exactly, but the transition halfway through seems to make the whole class feel more rich and focused. Instead of getting bored by spending 40 minutes on one thing (after the warmup) there's more of a variety of experiences. Some input and some output from the students, more of a multi-media, multi-channel experience that draws on more of their faculties. That's why it feels more rich.
Hopefully, I can stay ahead of my planning from now on, and keep including two activities and a transition in each class.
