Oops, Your Reflection is Showing

Teachers,

Here is your weekly dose of “5-Point Friday. 

Oops, Your Reflection is Showing  —

One of the other topics Trisha talked about in our training was reflection in the classroom. One suggestion she gave to us is to have teachers reflect own their individual classroom engagement. What is the best way to do this? Video. Don’t freak out. Let me explain. She mentioned that each of the teachers in our present day has a video camera with them every day. It is your phone. All teachers need to do is set it up and video them teaching. No one else in the world needs to see it. No one else needs to hear it. But just watching ourselves will not give us the information we need to make us better teachers. We need to watch with intent to learn. No one else needs to see it…ever. So this is my suggestion. I purchased some wonderful tripods that hold phones. I also have a paper that goes with the tripod for reflection on the video. All a teacher needs to do is set it up in a corner of the room to video the class during a whole group lesson. I would even suggest putting gate camera in a couple different places over a couple days to get good data to reflect on. Then the teacher watched 15 minutes of the video (or a couple videos) and collect information on the paper. Look for opportunities to respond for students. The teacher asks questions and  during the reflection tallies each time a student responds. If the whole class responds with whiteboards or thumbs or chorally, a C is entered for whole class. Then the teacher looks for positive or corrective interactions. Positive interactions are comments or actions with students that are doing what they need to be doing. Corrective interactions are getting students back on task with a positive or firm correction. The last is how many distractions are there that take the instruction off course. From this information collected, a teacher can reflect on how students are reacting and acting when the teacher is teaching. If coaching is needed or wanted, the teacher contacts Alma, Glen, or Kim and we support, offer strategies or resources, and coach the teacher to increase student success in the classroom. This is an optional strategy to help teachers see what we just can’t always see. If the teacher is perfect, this will only show that in the video. If they are not, it gives them an opportunity to get better at teaching and increasing the success in the classroom. I thought back at how many times I had myself videotaped and the reflection process I went through with my coach. This is an opportunity to collect data on how students work in the classroom. If you are interested, please let me know and without question I will hand a tripod and reflection paper to you and will even take a few minutes to explain the paper to you. Make peace with reflection.

Quote I’m pondering —

“Whatever you’re doing, don’t give a voice to things you’re not able to change.” – Vince Vaughn

What I’m Watching —

This Is Water

This video was shown to the Tech Endorsement class on Tuesday by Tony. David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. These are a few excerpts from it.

Favorite Article This Week —

Teaching Adding Decimals:What If You Gave The Answer First

A blog article about teaching decimals with an interesting idea that goes against how we were taught to teach. How do we scaffold to help students understand. This is a lesson that provides the scaffolding to get students thinking.

A Big Thank You —

Thank you Kindergarten for all the opportunities you take to learn more. Thank you for being positive about teaching when you have half the time to teach your students. Only being able to teach each class twice a week is not an easy prospect when you have so many Standards to teach. Thank you for taking the time and asking the hard questions to make sure you understand what is expected. Thank you for taking care of our little ones and creating a great introduction to Dual Immersion learning at our school. Thank you for your time and efforts. Thank you for all you do. Thank you.

I appreciate all of you and your hard work. Have a wonderful weekend.