Learning Log

This week, a theme that continued to surface was the importance of collaboration, resource sharing, and professional learning in our overall growth as teachers. No teacher should be an island!

The artifact.

During EDUC 471, our class did a collaborative feedback activity. Each of us wrote our ideas for a lesson plan on large poster paper, outlining the opening, closing, filler activities, and 21st Century skills. To gain feedback from our fellow teacher candidates, we were each given post-it notes, and in the form of a gallery walk, we rotated around the room offering anonymous feedback for each of the lesson plans.

My lesson plan based based off the emergency lesson plan I’d created last week. When I received my feedback post-it notes, I was not only encouraged but also inspired to make necessary changes to my lesson plan. What an excellent professional development opportunity! I loved being able to learn from my fellow teacher candidates.

Throughout the week, our cohort also had many opportunities to collaboratively work through an eLearning course that was conducted completely online. In our own time, we individually did our readings, and then scheduled a “Learning Pod” time to discuss our main points of learning. I thoroughly enjoyed this time, because I got to learn alongside three other incredible future educators in my learning pod. I was struck by the meaningful connections and engaging discussions that were able to take place, even on an online platform.

Together, our learning pod discussed the potential pros and cons of using Twitter to engage with a professional learning network (PLN). Our PYP coordinate started a large Twitter thread, encouraging other educators on Twitter to share their must-follow-on-Twitter suggestions. Personally, I’ve been on Twitter since last year, and I enjoy how I am able to connect with and hear from such a broad range of different voices and expert ideas on one platform. Now that more teacher candidates in my learning cohort have Twitter, I am thrilled to become more engaged on Twitter, expand my PLN, and participate in live chats, such as general BC education talks (#bcedchat) and assessment (#atassessment).

Why it matters.

Throughout my undergraduate studies, I was often told that as teachers we need to be collaborators. The full of extent of that reality didn’t really sink in until this year. Now that I’m in the process of lesson planning for real students, and I’m faced with the reality that I don’t have the time to create brand-new lessons from scratch for all the units I will be teaching during PYP. The only real solution is to collaborate with other teachers by borrowing and sharing resources and engaging in conversations for ideas that are tried, tested, and true.

Collaboration is important for logistical reasons like time management and efficiency for the sake of students. Furthermore, collaboration is crucial to ensure teachers are repeatedly learning and growing.

This week, I retweeted this comment from a teacher on Twitter: “How can we expect students to be life long learners when the adults are displaying resistance to this mindset?” One way that teachers can model habits of life-long learning is by actively engaging in professional learning chats with other educators (such as on Twitter), taking opportunities to self-reflect (like we are doing in these learning logs), and being willing to share/critique/offer insight on various resources.

Many of the innovative ideas in education are also difficult to navigate alone. For instance, we cannot expect to “go gradeless,” implement inquiry into the Science classroom, or try new EdTech tools online on our own. We need a team of other educators to work with for encouragement, accountability, and discussion on what is and isn’t working well in our field. Change does come about in a series of small steps by individuals, but the individual needs a group to stand behind them, especially during the tougher times.

Next steps.

My goal for my professional year was to get more comfortable engaging with other educators on Twitter. For most of the past year, I’ve only really observed Twitter interactions from afar. My hope is that, with more of the PYP cohort present on Twitter, I will more comfortably connect with a broader PLN and engage in Twitter live chats like #ATAssessment and #bcedchat to share my own learning with other educators. Part of that confidence will come with realizing that I am learning valuable things that are worth sharing with other teachers. If I am really thankful for my learning, I should be happy to give back to the ed community by sharing my own resources, ideas, and stories.

My learning pod has also agreed to connect with each other regularly during the coming weeks to lesson plan and share coffee. My hope is that this time will be rich with mutual learning, sharing ideas, and connecting with future educators who are on the same journey as myself. I am thrilled that I don’t need to navigate this journey alone!

Professional Standard #7: Educators engage in professional learning.

Professional Standard #8: Educators contribute to the profession.

An underlying theme from this week of on-campus learning (with one day in school on Monday) was the critical thinking process.

As educators, we talk about critical and creative thinking often. We discuss it as the gold-standard skill we wish to develop in our students. It is one of the core curricular competencies in the BC Curriculum. But in practice, with all the content and pedagogical tools we like to incorporate into the classroom, the why behind these tools (and how they are linked to the thinking process) can be hidden from sight.

So how do I, in my everyday teaching methods, keep a focus on creative and critical thinking skills?

The artifact.

This week offered a rich set of artifacts (from a resource, from my SAs, and from my own lesson planning), which directly link to critical and creative thinking learning outcomes. Each of these artifacts aim to engage students in a step-by-step thinking process. The aim of each of these activities were to help students deconstruct answers that they may have learned from rote memorization, and by doing so, both the student and teacher are able to assess whether deep thinking has taken place.

This week at Yale, I led a short and simple formative quiz in Anatomy and Physiology. Students answered two broad questions (why and how questions) independently on their own sheets of paper. They were encouraged to include drawings of certain atoms/molecules to help explain their answers. During my introduction, I told students that I would be using the proficiency scale (found on page 10 of this curriculum document), denoted by a number from 1 to 4 (1=emerging; 2=developing; 3=proficient; 4=extending) to assess their answers. I emphasized that the “number 3” was not the same as 3 points out of 4. Their goal should be to meet proficiency (3, like an A), and only some of them will be able to take their explanations further into extending (4).

This week, I took note of how Karen scaffolds her writing assignments in English 9. I noticed that all of her writing assignments follow a clear, detailed set of step-by-step instructions for students to follow. This ensures that students are not just making a “product” (the final paragraph), but are mindfully working through the thinking and action steps along the way, which will help them develop powerful thinking strategies that can be carried forward into all of their writing in the future.

I tried to carry forward this scaffolded style of learning task into my “Emergency Lesson Plan” for English 9 I started planning this week. In my lesson, students conduct an independent research project, which requires students to conduct their own research and exploration of a category of media, and use evidence and observations to analyze what they observe and find the message/purpose of the text based on context. They will then construct an analysis project in response. In my instructions, I laid out the steps of the planning, research, brainstorming, and final writing stages to guide students through the writing process. My hope is that the thinking routines the students develop in this lesson will be carried forward into other aspects of English, the interdisciplinary, and the skills they require in life.

Why it matters.

I linked my formative assessment strategy from Monday’s Anatomy & Physiology 12 class to other thinking routines teachers might choose to employ. Giving students a formative quiz on previously-learned concepts encourages them to write out their thinking and reasoning. Encouraging them to draw diagrams as part of their answers is a helpful cognitive tool that helps them remember concepts and visualize them for themselves. Then, going through the answers as a class gives active feedback, allowing the students to self-reflect on their grasp of the ideas.

Ultimately, no matter the content taught in various classes, it’s the thinking process that matters most. The purpose of the new BC curriculum is to teach competencies that students will benefit from for the rest of their lives. Thinking skills are an integral competency.

I can also link thinking strategies to the inquiry-based Science and Math classrooms we are learning about in our EDUC 472 class. Inquiry is the process by which students are filling in self-assessed gaps in their learning. They engage with open-ended questions so that they are more aware of their own thinking and reasoning. The purpose of the inquiry classroom is less the answers students find (content), but the skills they develop along the way. Thus, the inquiry classroom, focused around critical and creative thinking, is a perfect fit for the new BC curriculum.

In the inquiry classroom, the role of the teacher is to set up learning activities and facilitate the learning in a way that allows students to engage with thinking routines. We are not teaching students what to think; we are teaching students how to think.

Next steps.

In our cohort learning block, we posed the question, “How do I know I’ve established a culture of thinkers in my class?”

Our results described a classroom where students speak often (more often than the teacher!) and are willing to collaborate with each other or even (respectfully) challenge the teachers’ ideas. A thinking class contains empathetic worldviews, integrated and interdisciplinary connections, deep and open-ended questions, and elaborate justification and explanation to answers. These are descriptors I hope will match my future classrooms.

This week, our cohort was introduced to an entire toolbox of thinking routines. These are strategies that guide students through a structured thinking process to encourage metacognition, social-emotional learning, and critical thinking. I would like to incorporate these thinking routines (and other formative assessment strategies) into my lesson planning as I move into in-person and online teaching in October.

Professional Standard #3: Educators understand and apply knowledge of student growth and development.

Professional Standard #5: Educators implement effective planning, instruction, assessment and reporting practices to create respectful, inclusive environments for student learning and development.

During my first week at Yale Secondary, I observed my mentor teachers (Nathan and Karen) in the preparation process and integrated myself as a part of the school community. Right away, the staff at Yale welcomed me warmly and showed a genuine curiosity about who I am and how I would like to be involved at the school. Despite its large size, Yale Secondary has a distinctly warm and welcoming atmosphere, which I’m sure students perceive as well.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: The start of a schedule that is half-in-person and half-distance-learning was strange to say the least. Many students commented that school during the pandemic feels “weird.” We wear masks in all common areas, and some students choose to wear them in the classroom during cohort learning. The schools has staggered entry and exit times for the different grade levels. The whole afternoon block is conducted online, with high-risk students being permitted to stay at school for in-person support. Lesson blocks are three hours long.

Yet the adaptability my mentor teachers (and the other staff in the school!) showed this week was impressive. During in-person class, Nathan planned multiple activities to break up the three-hour lesson block, and halfway through we took the students outside for a walk-and-talk. During the online class, Karen had to prioritize activities because eLearning requires more time to account for technical difficulties.

The artifact.

This week, I was interested to observe first-week routines. How did my mentor teachers take the time to build community and get to know students personally? How did they establish their classroom culture?

In both classes, personal connection started with attendance. Nathan asked me to stand at the door to greet students by name on their way in – this allowed us to check their daily health assessment, take attendance, and learn their names. Karen’s online classes started with “attendance questions,” where students interacted on Google Questions to get to know each other better and confirm their presence in the lesson.

Nathan spent a good part of his first day going around the classroom to each individual student, asking for a summer highlight. The rest of the week, all of his conversations with students stemmed from this first interaction. For homework, students filled in an online survey to more elaborately tell Nathan about themselves. Nathan memorized most names by the end of the second day. Our walk-and-talk in the middle of the 3-hour block allowed students to personally connect with each other while talking a body break. Nathan’s presence in the classroom also effortlessly weaves personal connection (by making jokes, personally addressing unique characteristics of different students, referring to the class as “family”) into the learning of Biology, and he also firmly (and sometimes playfully) communicates behavioural boundaries (“can we do hands?” “don’t speak over each other; quick classroom rule: we don’t have any fun” “my pet peeve is students packing up early when we still have 10 minutes of class left”).

Karen also spent most of her first class introducing herself, getting students to answer a get-to-know-you question verbally and with their video on over Google Meet, and establishing the eLearning routine for the next 5 weeks. All of her first activities this week involved students getting to know themselves and each other, and then writing a paragraph about their learning. She was also vulnerable with her students about how the eLearning platform is new and unfamiliar to her, and that she felt nervous on the first few days. Yet Karen also added, “But that’s okay. Being nervous makes it exciting.”

Why it matters.

The first week in a classroom is essential to establishing classroom culture and relationships. During staff orientation at school, the principal emphasized the need students have right now (during the pandemic) for social emotional learning at school, and he encouraged teachers to really take the time to support students relationally in this first week.

In my EDUC 310 (special education) course, we were taught that the human brain is physically incapable of learning when the individual is under great stress (see here for an article that talks about this). Learning circuits are interrupted and the student cannot ingest and digest new information or skills.

During this pandemic, a lot of students are under a great deal of stress. Ever since spring break, a lot of students have suffered from unmet expectations, a lack of rich social interaction, less freedom to try new things in their free time, and in general a greater sense of stress associated with their environment. International students have dealt with being separated from family for a prolonged period of time, or needed to self-quarantine upon returning to Canada. The Black Lives Matter movement of the recent months may also be an added stressor for a lot of students wrestling with the social issues the movement is bringing to the surface.

In other words, now more than ever, teachers have the crucial role of establishing safe relationships with students. The classroom environment is one that must be calming, vulnerable, open, and free from stress. In order for the class to learn properly, safe relationships need to be established and time taken to cater to the social emotional needs of each student.

The Lotus team at Yale Secondary (associated with their counselling department) released a social emotional learning video on the first day of school, introducing students to nervousness, stress, and anxiety, and they plan to continue providing activities and resources for all classes to participate in on a regular basis in the coming weeks.

Furthermore, establishing classroom routines is crucial because a lot of students require structure to feel stress-free. This way, students know what to expect but are also more likely to engage because the routine is simple and the learning is the focus.

Next steps.

To prepare for my future classroom, I am coming up with some ideas for activities that would cater well to the English and Biology classroom for the first week of school.

• In English, I’d like my students to partner up to get to know each other (maybe come up with a “socially distanced secret handshake” for a physical aspect), and then introduce their partner to the class. This will lead into a writing exercise, where they interview each other and write a formal paragraph about their partner.
• In Biology, I like the idea of implementing an attendance question (maybe linked to Biology) so I can have an initial conversation with each student on the first day.
• For both classes, having students complete an “About Me” survey would help me get to know them through a different platform that is less confrontational for students with anxiety (who may prefer to type out their answers).

As a teacher, I want to commit to the goal of learning all my students’ names by the third or fourth days of school. Getting students to make desk name tags for the first few days and giving them assigned seating in alphabetical order (like Nathan does) will help with that.

To establish what my expectations are, I will also create a document of the classroom code of conduct, so that when things come up that are outside of that code, I can confidently intervene.

As an aside, I would also like to do some research into ideas of how an eLearning classroom can still contain great relationships and excellent routines. This blogpost by Pearson emphasizes the importance of communicating with parents regularly (i.e. if students don’t show up for class, get in touch with parents right away) and asking for anonymous student feedback.

Professional Standard #1: Educators value the success of all students. Educators care for students and act in their best interests.

Professional Standard #5: Educators implement effective planning, instruction, assessment and reporting practices to create respectful, inclusive environments for student learning and development.

The first week of my Professional Year Program is officially complete! I’ve met my cohort of student teachers, had a tour of Yale Secondary (where I will be doing my practicum), and spent some time looking forward at the year ahead.

The artifact.

My greatest learning moment this week was realizing the importance of establishing a healthy group culture before approaching a year full of uncertainty. Frankly, I entered our first week of PYP with a lot of anticipation and nervousness. We are all entering a Big Unknown with a lot of questions: What will planning for learning look like this year? How will we navigate COVID-19 accommodations? Inevitably, the 2020-2021 school year will look different than anticipated, in a lot of ways. My past perceptions of what my PYP year would look like are being altered every day, as new changes are being announced and I need to step into a “new normal” alongside the school districts and my mentors.

This week our cohort spent two whole days working on team building and getting to know each other. We shared humorously and vulnerably. We talked about how we are all approaching this year with uncertainty. We also encouraged each other with the reality that we don’t have it all figured out, but we are all in this together. I take comfort in knowing that there are hundreds of educators in BC who are navigating the same challenges we are, every single day. Over the course of these first two days, I found comfort, peace, and a sense of empowerment in knowing I was part of a positive group culture, in my cohort and beyond – a group that was safe, vulnerable, open to criticism, and going through the same tough realities. I realized I’m not alone.

Why it matters + Next steps.

I’d like to carry this personal experience forward into my reality as an educator. This summer, our class read The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, in which he speaks about the importance of establishing a positive group culture to strengthen the team through adversity. This reality is true now, during COVID-19 times, more than ever.

As a teacher, I hope to focus the first weeks of teaching (this year and beyond) on establishing a classroom culture that is safe, vulnerable, and open to trying and failing. Those are essential aspects of culture in a group to ensure success in learning and growth. This means taking the time to get to know each other, remember names, and find out what each individual is passionate about. This means having a conversation about the kind of classroom culture I would like to establish – and if any behaviour comes up that goes against that culture, we will have something to refer back to. It might be easier to spend the first week of teaching diving right into Big Ideas and syllabus policies, but the truth is that establishing a safe and positive culture of belonging in my class right away should take priority. The rest will follow suit.

Professional Standard #5: Educators implement effective planning, instruction, assessment and reporting practices to create respectful, inclusive environments for student learning and development.