Quarter 1 and 2: August 2009-December 2009
To start out, I am so excited about how much more confident and successful I feel this year than I did for my first semester teaching at Rocky last year. The professional and personal relationships that I’ve made here at Fossil have really kept me going and make me feel like I really can be an awesome math teacher. Scott Wales, Kris Hegdal, Michelle DiGiovanni, Emily Cooper and I all share an office in the North wing and have supported each other through many things so far this year. I have been paired up with Martha Cranor as my mentor, which has proved to be a perfect partnership! Martha and I work very well together and have learned so much from each other even in this short amount of time. I am so grateful for the interest that Martha has shown in my teaching career. I feel like she really believes in my as a young, first-year teacher which has been inspiring and very helpful. Martha is an amazing teacher and I respect her opinion and have taken all of her advice to heart.
Geometry - As a high school student, I went through PSD when the math curriculum was the Integrated Algebra series. Because of this, I never actually took a high school geometry course when I was in school. I was a little bit nervous about this because, as much as I love geometry, I wasn’t sure if I had a strong enough background to teach the subject as confidently as I would have liked. I have found that, although Geometry is a challenge to teach as well as learn I have really enjoyed teaching it. Something that I have been extremely happy with in teaching geometry is that the subject lends itself to more discovery-type learning. It is much easier for me to have the students work on group activities and collaborative learning so that I don’t fall into lecturing to the students more than I should. One of my biggest challenges in teaching geometry, however, was (and still is) teaching proofs. The students strongly dislike doing proofs. This type of math is scary to the students because there is no algorithm or specific steps that they have to follow to get the answer. They need to be able to look at the information that is given to them and use their mathematical knowledge to analyze the information and mathematically explain step-by-step why something is true. This was hard for me to teach because I basically have to teach students how to think mathematically rather than to perform a series of mathematical steps, which they are not used to doing yet. As this point, the students are accustomed to being told how to do a problem and then given multiple versions of those problems to practice over and over. They don’t actually have to reason though the problem themselves. However, even though it is a challenge to teach, proofs force the students to think and reason mathematically, which has been a great learning experience for me and for them!
I have one student in my Geometry class who I have had to work with extra closely. The very first day of class when I had the students working on the diagnostic test in the beginning of the book he took me outside to tell me that he didn’t feel like he belonged in Geometry because he didn’t know how to do any of the problems I had asked them to do. He asked if he could go speak to his resource teacher, Ms. Coy (who I didn’t know at the time) to ask if he should switch classes. I later learned that Zach is a 2nd year senior who suffers from extreme anxiety. He is still taking high school courses because the ESS department and his parents didn’t feel like he was mentally and socially ready to move onto higher education courses, even at Front Range. The first couple of weeks were difficult because Zach was constantly pulling me aside to tell me that he was feeling anxious about the class and that he was falling behind on his homework for on reason or another. I think we’ve made very good progress since the beginning of the year, but there’s definitely still some work to do. I can say one thing: I know that I am gong to learn a lot from Zach this year. I know he is capable of being successful, he just doesn’t believe it himself yet.
Algebra 1 – My algebra classes have been quite a challenge for me this year. However I have found that most of the Algebra 1 teachers are struggling with the material. One of the hardest challenges with these two classes is the classroom management piece. On a daily basis I feel like I am constantly battling with the students in order to keep them calm enough to learn the information. Even though my goal is to try and use more collaborative learning in my classroom, I have struggled with that in my Algebra 1 classroom. When the students are working in groups, most of my time is spent trying to keep them from veering off track rather than spending my time circulating from group to group to help them understand the mathematical concepts they should be working on. In addition to struggling with the behavior in these classrooms, the material is proving to be quite difficult for the students as well; this is consistent across all of the Algebra 1 classes at Fossil. As a math department we are discussing strategies for interventions, and I would love to be one of the teachers to work with the struggling Algebra students. I, along with two other math teachers, have attended one session of training for the “Navigator” program (interventions for struggling math students) and have decided that we are going to try and take all of our Algebra 1 students who fail 1st semester and put them into this remedial math class. It is designed to get them back on track so that they won’t struggle when they take Algebra 1 for a second time. I have volunteered to teach this class and I am super excited!! The pedagogy that is used in this program is excellent and my goal will be to eventually implement strategies that I learn from teaching this remedial class into my other classes as well. Many teachers are warning me that teaching this class is going to be quite challenging, but I think it’s going to prove as an outstanding Professional Development opportunity for me as well.
Overall Goals/Successes/Improvements - One of my goals this year was to lecture less and to incorporate more collaborative learning. Although I feel like I’ve done much, much better with that than I did last year at Rocky, it still is an area of improvement for me. In geometry it was much easier to incorporate collaborative learning; however I struggled with it more in my Algebra 1 classes. I think this had a lot to do with the dynamic of the classroom and the type of students that were in that class together. One of my Algebra classes had a lot of classroom management issues.
Another one of my goals for this year was to have more regular contact with parents. Last year I found myself letting students slide by without contacting their parents to let them know they were struggling academically or behaviorally in my class. This semester I feel like I have done a much better job at contacting parents, but there is still room for improvement! I contacted parents a lot for behavioral issues but my goal for next semester is to have more contact regarding grades and academic issues that arise fairly early in the year.. This semester I found that I was so crunched on time that taking the time to call parents and let them know that their student is struggling was so difficult to do. I would like to find a system that would allow me to contact multiple parents at one time to let them know that their student has a ‘D’ or an ‘F’ in the class and then request that they contact me if they have any questions or concerns. This semester I tried to send report cards home to be signed by the parents and then returned to me; this didn’t work out as well as I would have liked. Only a few students brought the report cards back signed so I ended up having to call most of the parents anyway to let them know I sent a report card home and never saw it again. It kind of defeated my purpose J. Next semester I am thinking that I will create an email that can be sent to the parents of any of my ‘D’ and ‘F’ students. My goal is to get these emails out to parents as soon as I have enough grades in the gradebook to make a difference. I’d like to have these emails out a couple of weeks into quarter 3 (before parent-teacher conferences).
My biggest goal for this school year was to never take work home. I have been doing great meeting this goal! Last year I took work home every night and it completely burnt me out. I felt like I was working all day and then going home and working all night. Even if I have to stay late a few nights, it has been amazing to be able to keep work at work. This separates my home life from my work life, giving me the feeling that I have time to relax after school before getting up early to start work again! This gives me more of a separation between days which has kept my stress level more balanced than it was last year.
Quick Review of my Goals for Next Semester:
Ø More collaborative learning in the classroom (keeping students accountable for their learning)
Ø Continue not taking work home!
Ø Early contact with parents if the students have a ‘D’ or an ‘F’ in my class
Ø Stay healthy: eat healthy home-cooked food and find time to go to the gym after work J
Quarter 3 and 4: January 2010-May 2010
At the start of this quarter, I was no longer teaching any Algebra 1 classes. Instead I taught two of our four sections of “Ramp-Up to Algebra” for all of the Algebra 1 students who failed in the first semester. No other high school in Fort Collins teaches it and this is the first year that FRHS is using it as a part of their curriculum. Teaching this new class had me facing many challenges like motivation and participation, just to name a couple. However, I learned so much by teaching this course! Last semester when Michelle and I went to the Navigator/Ramp-Up district training we learned about teaching strategies that would be beneficial in any mathematics course, not just for the lower-level learners. For example, the Ramp-Up course specializes in student-lead instruction where the students will collaborate about a certain set of problems and then “teach” the class what they discovered about the mathematics by writing out how they worked on the problem on a transparency and then presenting it to the class. (I laugh because I feel like using overhead projectors is so ancient compared to all of the technology that we have available to us now, like SmartBoards. J) My favorite part about how the lessons are structured is that there is only 10 minutes of direct instruction to introduce the students to the topics that we will be covering that day and then the rest of it is student-based inquiry learning.
On the other hand, I really struggled with implementing this type of teaching with these particular students because the motivation piece was definitely not there. I had many kids who felt like they were “too good” and too smart to be in this class for “dumb kids” so they would refuse to work on the assigned problems because they were “too easy”. They treated the other students in the class like they were better than them which sometimes caused an uncomfortable atmosphere in my class. Classroom management is definitely my biggest area of improvement as a new teacher so working with this type of student group has been tough. What I struggle with the most is what to do with the individual students who refuse to work and to listen to me when I ask them to do something. Many other teachers that I have sought advice from have told me that I need to get them out of my class. Either give them a formal write-up with the deans or tell them to leave class in the moment when they are being defiant. I’m hesitant about this, and I’m not really sure why. Maybe I feel like if I try to get the formally removed from my class then I’m giving up on them…? Maybe this is my new-teacher idealistic mind-set that is talking, but I feel like I want to try all other options before I just kick him out of class. I tried working with his counselor, Nick Peterson, a lot which was pretty helpful. Throughout the semester I definitely made progress and gained the respect of many students in the Ramp-Up classes but there are many things that I know I would do differently next year if I was ever in this situation again.
As for the success of Ramp-Up as a class, I think that I’d have to teach it for more than a semester to really get a good idea on whether or not the Ramp-Up course would be a successful intervention. It’s a shame that we don’t really have the money to implement Ramp-Up again because I feel like Michelle and I have made a lot of progress with it and would probably be more successful if we had an entire year to teach it the way it was meant to be taught. It is a really good program and could really benefit our students if it was implemented the correct way. If anything, I hope to take some of the teaching strategies with me next year to use in my Geometry and Algebra 1 classes.
This year Michelle, Scott, and I offered to teach a new type of intervention course for next year where we are going to target 60 of our lowest level Algebra 1 students coming in from the Middle Schools and put them in the same class to try and implement tiered instruction within the course. The idea is that we will start out in the Roundhouse will all 60 students and eventually split them into groups based on their ability level. We’d like to see them everyday (do a double-block type course) but I don’t think that we’re going to have the resources to do that. Ideally we’d like to teach the section together with all 60 students, quiz them, and then split them up based on how they understood/mastered the lesson. We’d split them into low, medium, and high groups for intervention and extension work. I’m really excited about this class but really nervous too. I think Michelle, Scott, and I work extremely well together so we could be very successful as a team, but having 60 low-level Algebra 1 students all in the same room could be potentially hard to manage J