Best Practice - Chapters 8 & 9

I think that the most important concept I came away with after reading, Best Practices, Chapters 8 and 9 is the idea of balance. A teacher needs to find balance in the classroom. “Balance is the key.” As a teacher, and now a principal, this has always been my way of thinking. The seven structures of best practices was very helpful in putting the emphasis of a student-centered classroom in perspective. I think, as educators, it is most important to “make it real” for the students in our classrooms. Take the classroom’s curriculum and make it authentic, make it genuine and bring bits of the world into schools or bring the students out into the world. Students, whenever they hear that a field trip is scheduled, get very excited. The real world is waiting for them. Each year, at the school where I work, we take the 8th grade class to Washington, DC for the week. Each day is filled with authentic, exciting events that make real learning happen. The 8th graders also got to choose some of the activities that they would be involved in over this week, making them a real, responsible partner in the curriculum planning. Along with traveling out onto the fields at Gettysburg, they also wanted to visit the Spy Museum and learn about various espionage activities over the years. The pre visit activities, the research work that goes on during the trip and the follow-up work that concludes the trip, as well as, the events during the week’s stay in Washington make this a learning experience that could never be duplicated in the classroom.Chapter 9 dealt with making changes within the curriculum. I agree with the idea that change can be very difficult at times especially with teachers that have been at the job for many years. I have also watched as we attend inservices with wonderful ideas being presented, but if I did not require that a new idea needs to be practiced within the next few weeks, I am not sure that it would happen. We had an inservice on Classroom Management where the presented gave all kinds of very practical, wonderful ideas for management in the classroom. I had the faculty choose one idea that they especially connected with and try it in the classroom over the next two weeks. During this two week period, each teacher would journal their findings at the end of each day. At the end of the two week period, during the faculty meeting, we all shared the positive and negative that came from this experience. Many teachers found that what was tried worked wonderfully and it became a part of their classroom management techniques. Others asked for advice from faculty members to fine tune what they had experienced. All in all, this was a very positive experience for all at the school, both students and faculty members alike.

Senge - Orientation

One of the most important messages coming from Senge, Orientation, Sections 1 – 5, is the connection between the classroom, the school and the community. The school where I am principal is located in a small community, population approximately 10,000 people. It has been a part of this community for 56 years. A small community has its advantages. We have a local newspaper that keeps the community informe3d of all of the school’s accomplishments. The teachers at the school call upon local community members to come into the classroom to teach various lessons; for example, the curator at the town museum is also an archeologist and comes into the 6th grade to teach a lesson on archeology, the 2nd grade has a week in which local businessmen people come into the classroom to speak about their jobs, a retired gentleman comes into various classrooms to teach cultural dancing, the local police force provides their drug enforcement officer to speak to the junior high on drug awareness, 3rd grade visits a local winery, as well as, an olive oil company to learn about Sonoma County’s agricultural products, etc. The community is always invited to any activity that takes place at the school. This helps to keep the community connected to the school in a very important way.

Another important message from this reading was the school as a place for organizational learning. The five key disciplines play an important part of this. These help to deal with the many and various pressures of education today. I think that one of the biggest concerns today is keeping the school in line with the shifts in society and family that affect children. At St. John School, in the past 10 years, it has been increasingly important to deal with the split family. Many children are shifted from mom’s to dad’s home every other week. This becomes very confusing for children as well as, for the teacher. As a faculty we have had to discuss this and come up with ways to help mom and dad keep some method of similarity in working with their children. We continue to need to work with divorced families. At the same time, we had to look long and hard at the type of child in our classrooms today. We all know, the nineteenth century industrial world school model just does not work today. As a faculty, one of the most important shifts to the technological world that we made this year was the purchase of Smartboards for all classrooms at the school. These boards have made quite an impact in the teaching and delivery of lessons. They are a colorful tool. Researchers indicate that students respond to displays where color is employed. The Smartboard can accommodate different styles of learning. Tactile learners can benefit from touching and marking at the board, audio learners can have the class discussion recorded for playing back at a later time, and visual learners can see what is taking place as it develops at the board. Smartboards were originally used in the business world for group meetings. They have made quite an impact at the school where I work.

Chapter 5 - Choosing A Set Of Outcomes

Choosing a Set of Outcomes - Chapter 5

As stated in Chapter 5, “Learning means responding effectively to the situation. It implies growth and leads to more learning.” About five years ago, at the school where I am employed, as a faculty, we came up with a principle for all grades, “What Can I Do With What I Know.” These words were made into large banners to be placed in all grades. After reading Ozar’s, Chapter 5, it made me go back to the time when we worked on curriculum outcomes for the school. We wanted this phrase to encompass all outcomes. If one is truly learning, then one should be able to apply this learned knowledge to many areas in life, to the real world. To create an outcomes-centered curriculum must include outcomes that connect to both the value-integration plane and the discipline-specific plane. These disciplines will continue to be useful and needed well past formal schooling years, for the rest of one’s life. This is what has helped to make Catholic education so unique. Not only is the academic curriculum of high standards but also that part of the curriculum that works on developing the whole child.

John Dewey, in which much of the idea behind the reading in Chapter 5 was compared to, was a very important contributor to the concept of the student centered approach to education. He was a believer in teaching students how to be problem solvers by teaching them how to think and to allow students to participate in decisions that affect their learning. He believed in having students learn by doing. It is interesting to note that he published many of his ideas on education about one hundred years ago, but they are still very valuable today. When working with choosing a set of outcomes, I felt that the Jesuit’s five characteristics for a graduate in acquiring “life-performance roles” were accurate: “a graduate that is a open to growth, is intellectually competent, religious, loving, and committed to being just.” To begin with a set of outcomes that provide a statement of what is to be learned with assessment methods and curriculum context to follow provides the foundation for a strong curriculum where real learning will be the end result.

Writing Curriculum

After reading Lorraine Ozar's Creating A Curriculum That Works, Chapters 1 - 4, it made me go back to our school's SLE's and take another hard look at what we had written. This is our planning year for next year's WASC visit. As a faculty, we worked long and hard on these. We had originally written these a number of years ago and have adjusted each year as was necessary. As teachers, we all needed to remember that student outcomes are written from the student's point of view, not the teacher's. Using Bloom's Taxonomy, we came up with outcomes that identify what students are to learn and how students will demonstrate what has been learned. We spent a lot of time working on these. We had many discussions as a faculty when writing these as to whether we were writing a goal or if what we were writing were truly outcomes. It was then time to start collecting different samples of student's work to show the specific learning that was taking place. These student samples were filed in each classroom's SLE evidence box. It was quite a process and only made our curriculum that much better with more active learning taking place.

With formal classroom observations, each teacher needs to write up a formal lesson plan where the lesson outcome (objective) is clearly stated. The pre-observation visit includes discussion on the objective to see if it is clearly stated from a student's point of view with both a written and a verbal explanation as to how the objective will be reached. Is the objective a true statement of what the teacher would like the student to learn and the methods to be taken to help students learn that objective? For some faculty members this isn't always an easy job as many continue to think more in the traditional lesson planning instead of selecting the desired outcome first and then the curriculum is created to support the desired outcome. For those who have been in the educational field for many years, this has been quite an adjustment, almost reversing what they had been taught and had done for many years.

Blog I - Parents, Where Are They? / Digital Natives

I found the reading entitled, "Parenting: The Lost Art" by Kay S. Hymowitz to be the most disheartening of the articles assigned to read. Because most teachers/administrators involved with Catholic education emphasize the importance of a partnership with parents in educating youth, this cannot happen when parents take on a passive role and leave the job of education entirely in the hands of the teacher. Granted, children today are native speakers of the digital language; whereas, parents are digital immigrants which might be one reason for the passivity of parents today. Children's brains are wirede differently than their parents. Do they truly understand the best way(s) to help their child be as successful as possible? On a personal note, I have had children who struggle with math and when I had the need to contact a parent to inform them of their child's difficulty, their response was that they could no longer help their child as they did not understand the math themselves. This was 6th grade math. I was never sure if that was a true statement or becuase parents sre so busy today trying to manage work as well as a family that it is easier to break the "partnership" and put the full responsibility to the classroom teacher. This has been a problem for a number of years and appears to become more prevalent each year.

The article I found to be most interesting was "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" by Marc Prensky. As educators, the need to change methodology to reach the digital natives is of utmost importance. Being in Catholic education for 25 years, I have found a need to always be changing with the times when it comes to working with youth. The biggest challenge has always been interacting with students to keep them focused and understanding curriculum. Now, being in the position of administrator, I felt the need to jump into the 21st century with updating technology by installing SmartBoards in all classrooms, K - 8. This has made a huge difference in the presentation of lessons plus the interaction of students with the lesson being taught. The interactive boards facilitate student participation through the ability to interact with materials on the board. Lessons can be called back up from a home computer for review or to allow a child who was absent to view the missed lesson. Students are more motivated and focused, as I have witnessed, with the use of these boards. The digital natives are quite at ease with the use of these boards, and at times, helping the teacher to do navigate through certain programs connected to the interactive board.