Matching Strategy with Teacher Style (EDU 6526)

This week’s module on direction instruction and cultural literacy reinforced my belief that instructional strategies can only take a class so far – the engagement of students is often more a result of the teacher. As we moved along through the Survey of Instructional Strategies course, we studied many strategies that essentially opposed the traditional approach of direct instruction. Even members of the class posted comments regarding their bad experiences with direct instruction in history classes. Yet their concerns don’t really seem to be about direct instruction, as it is the engagement with material. My guess is that most students (at least college age or older) have experienced at least one professor or teacher who used direct instruction and kept the class enthralled in the topic. My point is that the strategy itself isn’t flawed – it is the combination of the wrong strategy at the wrong time with the wrong teacher.

I advocate for teachers at least trying to use as many instructional strategies as possible. This variety keeps the class’ attention and keeps a teacher thinking of new ways to introduce content. At the same time, most teachers should hone in on the strategies that work for them the best. With this said, teachers must have an idea for how the classroom should generally look like on a daily basis. I enjoy the approach of Mortimer Adler and the “Paideia” program. The emphasis on values and ideas that people face throughout history is a perfect approach for our Collegio curriculum at Seattle Prep. As an integrated course of English and History, we teach from the perspective of big ideas, themes, and essential questions. This makes more a curriculum that allows students to connect ideas from the 17^th century with those from the 21^st. History no longer becomes a classroom of facts, dates, and names. It becomes a room where ideas are discussed based on time periods and context.

Cooperative Learning – Not Just for 1st Graders (EDU 6526)

Despite the fact that cooperative learning reminds some of kindergarten play time, in reality it proves to be one of the more influential and challenging instructional strategies that a teacher faces. No matter which age group a teacher uses cooperative learning experiences, there are challenges with socialization (both too much and too awkward). Yet in spite of these difficulties, the reward gained for student engagement and achievement wins out when deciding whether or not to use cooperative learning in a high school classroom.

Many of my lessons follow a format of me introducing a topic with some content followed by work individually that is followed up in cooperative learning groups of some kind. This often looks like pair work, but can many times be up to four members in a group. As the lecture states this week, there are many potential pitfalls to watch out for in using cooperative learning experiences. When the groups get too large (which I have done before), there are students who simply will not participate. Assigning tasks for each member can alleviate some of this, but it still makes it hard for a quiet kid to participate when there are even five or six members in a group. Additionally I find that my role in setting up the cooperative learning, as well as monitoring can greatly change the success or failure rate of a lesson. In other words, the more clear I am with my instructions, often times the better the work groups will produce. While this seems fairly obvious, I don’t think it can be overestimated. Secondly, the more I am physically present near groups by walking around the room and checking in, the better work they produce. Sometimes this comes about because they see me near them and they ask a question. Sometimes it is simply because they know they can’t screw around.

More often than not my cooperative learning involves the jigsaw. This works well in history as I can divide up a document or provide multiple primary sources for students to answer questions about or analyze. They then learn much more as a group by hearing from all members. As Dell’Olio and Donk state in Models of Teaching, “Rather than focusing on rote memorization of facts, her students are working as historians to construct the meaning of their documents contextually” (Dell’Olio, 270). Thus the jigsaw does not allow students to be passive. In order to truly participate, students are forced to use higher level thinking skills. Because of this and because of the social interaction it causes, I strongly support the jigsaw in high school history classrooms. Yet it is also very clear from my experience that I must have a very active role for the cooperative learning experience to be successful. This isn’t a time for passive teachers either.

Attention Students: Does it Matter What I Call It? (EDU 6526)

When I began my teaching career I was literally thrown into the fire. With a teacher stepping away in October of the school year, they needed a history teacher and they found me. Only……I wasn’t a history teacher nor really a teacher yet. I worked at the school, understood teenagers and taught one senior Economics course. It proved to be enough at the time and through hard work I became a respected, full time teacher at Seattle Prep. Yet despite my confidence and ability as a teacher, I simply didn’t come strapped with all the knowledge a certified teacher did. So it comes with this limitation that I really enjoyed this week’s work with advanced organizers in Survey of Instructional Stratgies.

In many ways I used advanced organizers at different times in my classes. I never called them that, thought of them as that or really fully understood what I was doing. Yet I found ways to take the seemingly unrelated to students and connect it to new material. I bridged the gap between the lives they live and the history I want them to know. This is what advanced organizers can do. My only critique of them comes from the semi-hypocrisy of David Ausubel and the authors of the Models of Teaching text. The text states: “Ausubel’s definition of advance organizers does not include strict operational guidelines for constructing them” (Dell’Olio, 394). At the same time Ausubel seems to give a lot of criteria, as does the PowerPoint lecture, of what advanced organizers ARE NOT.  While I understand we want to classify what these exactly are, it seems somewhat trivial to even worry about what they are or are not. The goal of an educator – in my opinion – is to challenge students to think critically and to be engaged in the material. I want to make these students better people for themselves and for the world around them when they leave my class. If I do that through a personal story, advanced organizer or joke, it doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t want to spend time worrying about the labels and whether I actually am using an advanced organizer. I want my students to love learning and advanced organizers can help me. Yet I won’t spend time worrying whether I matched the criteria correctly. I will only worry if I got those kids engaged in the lesson.

Concepts in the Classroom (EDU6526)

What needs improvement? More higher level questions for class discussion. Or….provide opportunities for critical

Bloom's Taxonomy

thinking. These comments stood out to me in my classroom observations over the past few years as a Collegio (integrated History and Engligh) teacher at Seattle Prep. While I flourished in many ways and students enjoyed my style, the challenge continued to be finding ways to push those students to grapple with higher level thinking. How do I move beyond content and into concepts? This question riddled many teachers and in fact, still provides struggles for many with years of experience. Hence this “radical” approach to thinking was the central focus of last week’s module in the Survey of Instructional Strategies course.

Professor Tracy Williams highlighted in the lecture PowerPoint how the idea of teaching concepts or themes can benefit students regardless of curriculum. She stated: “while content may change from unit to unit and from year to year in a curriculum, the themes remain as conceptual points of reference. The themes have the power of ideas, and ideas are the mortar which holds together the curricular building blocks” (Williams). This is Collegio at Seattle Prep – or at least after we revised the curriculum this summer. In my junior Collegio with the focus on American History, we take essential questions and a theme for each unit and it builds upon the previous unit. In many ways, we stick with the question of what it means to be an American and who gets included in the definition? As we move from the Revolutionary Era to the Civil War we start to see very clearly that the North and South view the definition differently and that African-Americans are not included. Then the students get to wrestle with the theme of power (politically, militarily, economically and socially) and how that influences the definition. The units are not about names and dates; they are about ideas and concepts.

A Water Class or Concept Class?

This continues with my senior course called Ecology, Economics, and Ethics: The Global Water Crisis as we teach students to become advocates of change. The course features the issues surrounding water, but it isn’t really about that. We could teach the course on hunger, disease, religion, forgiveness or any other multitude of topics. The theme is how do seniors in high school learn to combat the system and become agents of change? How do they advocate for the disadvantaged? We simply use the content to teach those skills. This is concept learning at its best and it makes me very proud to be a part of it.

Effective Teaching: Not One Philosophy or Instructional Strategy (EDU6526)

As we wrap up the first week in Survey of Instructional Strategies, the class readings and discussion provided a great overview of what it means to be a good teacher. Although it may not have been originally designed in this manner, I interpret this information to be all the various sources that lead to good teaching. So what does this mean? I believe that there isn’t one instructional strategy provided by Marzano that should be used much more than any other. The key to good teaching is using the variety of strategies effectively to engage students in material and push them to think critically, especially at the high school level. In the same way, a teacher should pick and choose aspects of the various philosophies of education as outlined in Jeanine M. Dell’Olio and Tony Donk’s book Models of Teaching. To stick exclusively to one type of philosophy does not make an effective teacher who makes a positive impact.

In reflecting on my three years of experience as a Social Studies teacher at Seattle Prep, I can see my own philosophy embedded in almost every philosophy outlined in the Models of Teaching text. There are times I find myself sticking to the academic rationalism approach (Dell’Olio, 29) and ensuring students understand content, especially with my freshmen taking Western Civilization. However, I rarely stand at the front and lecture. I tend to look to the maieutic method while providing questions and cues as Marzano states in his text Classroom Instruction that Works. As both texts state, higher level questions provide students with the opportunity to analyze information and come to their own conclusions on significance (Marzano, 112, Dell’Olio, 30). This is vitally important in a history classroom. I refuse to allow my students to be passive learners. I constantly ask them “so what”? Why does it matter that Sparta treated women better than Athens when comparing city states in Greek civilization? Why does it matter that the North won the Battle of Gettysburg?

At other times I look toward the cognitive processing model of teaching students how to learn or how to think (Dell’Olio, 31). In many ways, this is essential to a Jesuit education. We strive to graduate students who embody the profile of a graduate at graduation which means they are intellectually competent, open to growth, loving, spiritually alive, and committed to justice. For students to reach this profile, they must learn how learn not just content. This is essential. At the same time, I believe I must develop positive, healthy relationships with students in my classes. This fits right in with the self-actualization philosophy in which I take into account the affective domain or feelings and beliefs of my students before I ever reach content or skill development (Dell’Olio, 37). And the list goes on and on. To be the most effective teacher possible, I cannot limit myself to one philosophy or one instructional strategy. I must utilize them all at the right moments so that my students are positively impacted as much as possible. I do this by listening, being attentive, asking questions of students and other teachers and being open to growth myself. It isn’t a static process; it is ever dynamic and I love every minute of it.

References

Dell’Olio J.M.. & Donk. T. (2007). Models of Teaching: Connecting Student Learning with Standards. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Marzano, R.J., Pickering, D.J., & Pollock, J.E. (2001). Classroom Instruction that Works. Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Getting Students up to P.A.R.R.

With a navy blue, hooded sweatshirt pulled tight over his head, he slouches down in his desk hoping not to be called on. Flanked by the overzealous, eager overachiever and the caffeine guzzling, text-a-holic, he is one of the many. The athlete who refuses to show his brains to match his brawns. The class clown hoping to gain attention by diverting it from the teacher. Unique to their class, but not unique to the classrooms of America. They all are wonderfully unique, yet the same to many teachers. These are the student profiles that teachers encounter on a daily basis in 21^st century American classrooms. Full of hope, promise, fear, trepidation and brilliance – all of them. As a teacher it becomes essential to find a way to reach all of them – to make education relevant to each and every one – while not using gimmicks or tricks. This can only be achieved through a solid foundation; it can only be achieved through developing one’s educational philosophy.

As a teacher, if one does enough research, he or she can find educational pedagogy or theory to support a wide variety of philosophies. Thus, it becomes even more important to identify the core values or beliefs that I hold to be most important as an educator. I must decipher which theories and philosophies align with my beliefs. To do this, I begin with my own education. As a graduate of Seattle Preparatory School and Santa Clara University, I spent eight years in Jesuits schools. While learning as a student, I failed to realize the pedagogy behind the content I learned in those classrooms. It wasn’t until I became a Jesuit educator myself that I realized how much I enjoyed the Jesuit approach. This pedagogical story began nearly 500 years ago. As a young worker with the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola began opening schools for his new Jesuit recruits throughout Europe. After a request from the magistrates of Messina in Sicily, Ignatius began opening schools for lay people as well. In a letter he wrote about the

St. Ignatius - Founder of the Jesuits

founding colleges in December of 1551, Ignatius wrote, “Finally, since young boys become grown men, their good education in life and doctrine will be beneficial to many others, with the fruit expanding more widely every day” (O’Neal, 2003). Ignatius and the Jesuits saw that with educated men being able to become lifelong learners, they could make an impact on the world. This idea evolved over the years to involved compassionate and service-based education. As a way to move Jesuit ideals into action in the classroom, the Jesuits created the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm in 1993 (JSEA, 1994).

Based upon the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP) involves five steps to education: context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation (JSEA, 1994, p. 298). This approach allows teacher to build upon past classes and learning (context), trying out a new skill or lesson (experience), reflecting and group work (reflection), homework or assignments (action), and evaluating their understanding of material from the previous day (evaluation). While the Jesuits created a model that I can appreciate and look to for guidance in developing my own philosophy, it isn’t the only model with a similar approach. In fact, educational philosophers and experts for years valued the “experience” and “context” involved in teaching a lesson much more than the traditional educational format would have one believe. With the focus on standardized tests and the physical structure of a classroom – involving a lectern and desks in rows – it seems as if education really hasn’t changed since the Colonial era. Yet evidence shows that many educators value the IPP approach or something similar.

American education philosopher John Dewey emphasized experience in his philosophical approach to education. He wrote in his book entitled Experience and Education:

John Dewey

“What we want and need is education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan. It is for this reason alone that I have emphasized the need for a sound philosophy of experience (Dewey, 1938, p. 91).

With a focus on experience as the central manner in which to educate young people, Dewey in many ways rejected the old educational model. At the same time, Dewey took special consideration of not blindly supporting experience without addressing the questions that would arise from other educators. Throughout his book, Dewey presents possible questions to using experience as the model in education and continually addresses those concerns. While Dewey valued experience in education, he clearly also finds importance in context. In his Pedagogic Creed, Dewey stated: “Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted – we must know what they mean” (Dewey, 1897, p. 78). Dewey believed that teachers couldn’t simply teach all children the same way. He believed in not only the experience, but finding out what students’ talents, interests, and habits are in the classroom. Only though combining these two factors could a teacher truly be effective. While Dewey may be considered the giant of educational philosophy, many others came along before or after who agreed with this viewpoint.

Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire, despite living in a different area of the world, agreed with Dewey on the importance of context and experience in education. While he focused mostly on social movements and ensuring that oppressed people had access to education, Freire accomplished this through this writing on the experience in the classroom and outside as well. In Joy Palmer’s Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present, she described Freire’s approach. Palmer (2001) states, “Education can help us to understand the world we live in and can make us better prepared to transform it, but only if we deeply connect education to the larger realities in which people live, and to struggles to alter those realities” (Palmer, 2001, p. 130). As teachers it is imperative to not assume prior knowledge or to simply instruct without context. Freire believes that a student will become more knowledge and ultimately a better citizen of the world if they can connect their work in the classroom to the world outside. This can be achieved through an educational approach to involve context, action and reflection. As I review multiple approaches to education, it becomes clear that I value a multi-faceted approach that requires students to not only be engaged but to also reflect upon their involvement in the educational process. I build my philosophy off of the Jesuit approach but alter to fit my personality as well. My approach is “Getting Students up to P.A.R.R.”. In this case, P.A.R.R. stands for prior knowledge, action, reflection and repetition. Through this educational process, the student will then learn skills that will allow them to become a life long learner. 

As many educational scholars point to students needing a connection to material in the classroom, I believe prior knowledge to be essential to education. As I begin a lesson, I spend the beginning ensuring that students understand the purpose and rationale for the lesson. Additionally they must be able to relate to the content and apply it to their experience. This can be achieved through accessing prior knowledge. For example, when I teach a lesson on the Stamp and Sugar Acts of the Revolutionary Era in United States history, I can access prior knowledge in students through a variety of ways. I can compare the experience to protesting some rules at school or I can have them review the prior events in American history up to this point. This allows students to begin their engagement in the material and to begin applying it. After this point, I move toward action. While there are days that I will lecture at the front of a classroom, I really don’t believe that learning can take place passively. If students simply sit in their desks and attempt to take in knowledge that I recite to them, then they will never engage the material fully. It is essential that students interact with each other and construct their own knowledge with my assistance. This is the action step of my philosophy. Other educational scholars agree with this approach. Barry Kort and Rob Reilly (2002) wrote about a new approach to education using this type of model in their article entitled “Restructuring Educational Pedagogy: A Model for Deep Change”. They stated: “The focii of attention shifts to the construction of ‘knowledge’ and to the extraction of meaningful ‘insights’ from the ‘big picture’. When ‘knowledge’ is coupled with a personal or cultural value system, ‘wisdom’ emerges” (Kort, 2002, p. 3). Through context and action, the student can begin to gain skills and knowledge that can transform material outside of the classroom and into their daily lives. Yet this process won’t be complete until they reflect on the experience. 

Reflecting on the material and the student’s own experience becomes an essential aspect to my educational philosophy. After experiencing the learning process through a given lesson, students are required to reflect on the learning that took place. Too often reflection gets interpreted as journal writing or sharing in small groups. This isn’t my purpose. My aim is to have students be able to identify why the lesson matters to them or to history, what is significant about the lesson, and why they need to learn the material. This allows students to attach meaning to the learning. Instead of simply taking notes on why I think the material is important, I strive to have students identify this key to the process. Often this can be achieved through written assignments, but also can be done more informally through class discussions or small group work. Reflection provides students with the necessary discernment period to capture the meaning of the lesson. Without this process, students would superficially learn the material but would not truly engage in the acquisition of knowledge. After this step, students must repeat the process. This does not imply that students must repeat the same lesson over and over, nor does it mean they should repeat learning the same facts, dates, or names. It does mean that students absolutely must repeat the process and the skill work gained in the process. For example, if my students work on creating thesis statements concerning a topic in the Middle Ages unit in freshmen history, they will follow the whole P.A.R.R. process. They will access their prior knowledge, not only of the Middle Ages, but of creating thesis statements. As they think about their prior work, the students will begin creating these statements and even get feedback from others through the action step. As they complete their thesis statements, they then reflect on how they did in the process. Could they have done better? What would they do differently? As we move to other units such as the Age of Exploration, they practice the skill of thesis statement creation again. This ultimately not only gets students up to par, but creates life long learners in the process. 

With an educational philosophy built upon the repetitive process of acting and reflecting students learn to appreciate the acquisition of information rather than going through the motions in school. The more meaning students can attach to their learning, the more they seek opportunities to learn in the future. As Dexter Chapin describes in his book Master Teachers: Making a Difference on the Edge of Chaos, teachers choose their profession in many ways to experience these moments of connection that students experience. He states: “Everybody has moments of success, but teachers see it every time the kids’ eyes light up when they see and understand something never seen and never understood before” (Chapin, 2009, p. 12-13). As students reflect on their action and experience, they attach meaning. Through this process they see that learning is something that they achieve, not something that happens passively. They DO it. Thus in many ways learning becomes a part of life through my educational philosophy. It doesn’t exist solely in a classroom. In traditional African Education, learning and life are not separated. Timothy Reagan points this out in Non-Western Educational Traditions: Alternative Approaches to Educational Thought and Practice. He states: “Education, then, in the traditional African setting cannot (and indeed, should not), be separated from life itself. It is a natural process by which the child gradually acquires skill, knowledge, and attitudes appropriate to life in his or her community” (Reagan, 1996, p. 19). While non-Western educational traditions may differ in many ways, they approach the purpose of education in similar ways to my philosophy – to create learners for life. Our processes to get there may be different, but the end result is the same. Ultimately this should be the goal of any educator at the elementary or secondary level. Hopefully this leads to an adult who will access their prior knowledge, act upon it and then reflect on the meaning. My goal is for this process to begin in high school and to continue for the rest of their lives. It can be best described by Mortimer Alder in Reforming Education as writes, “I would hope that somehow the feast of knowledge and the excitement of ideas would be made attractive to them, so that when they left school, they would want to go on learning. In school they must be given, not learning, for that cannot be done, but the skills of learning and the wish to learn, so that in adult life they will want to go on learning and will have the skills to use in the process” (Alder, 1977, p. 249). Any educator would be pleased with that. 

References 

Alder, M.J. (1977). Reforming education: The schooling of a people and their education beyond schooling. Boulder:  Westview Press. 

Chapin, D. (2009). Master teachers: Making a difference on the edge of chaos. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Education. 

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier Books. 

Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. School Journal, 54, 77-80. 

Glassman, M. (2001). Dewey and Vygotsky: Society, experience, and inquiry in educational practice. Educational Researcher, 30 (4), 3-14. 

The International Commission on the Apostolate of Jesuit Education. (1994). Ignatian pedagogy: A practical approach. Washington , DC: JSEA. 

Kort, B. & Reilly, R. (2002). Restructuring educational pedagogy: A model for deep change. The Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

O’Neal, N. (2003). The Life of St. Ignatius of Loyola. 

Palmer, J.A. (Ed.). (2001). Fifty modern thinkers on education: From Piaget to the present. New York: Routledge. 

Reagan, T. (1996). Non-western educational traditions: Alternative approaches to educational thought and practice. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Learning Differences and Success

The reading for this week’s class in Students as Learners focuses on exceptional learners and those with learning differences. This topic hits very close to home for me due to a couple of reasons. I spent my first two years working at Seattle Prep in the Learning Resource Center (LRC) as an administrative assistant and then program tutor. Secondly, my wife faces challenges with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) both in her personal life and in academic work. Through these experiences, I learned that students with learning differences simply process information differently and often benefit from systems and structure which benefits me as a classroom teacher.

As a program tutor, I spent numerous hours working one-on-one with students. I created plans for work, broke down

Differences in brain activity with an ADHD child

 chapters in A Catcher in the Rye, designed homework action plans, and tutored in math and history. It proved to be a very rewarding time for me. It made me realize I wanted to teach full time. I feel extremely fortunate that my first experience with “teaching” (other than my coaching) involved working with students who possessed learning differences. This forced me to come up with creative ways for students to achieve success. It forced me to meet students where they were in the learning process rather than where I think every student should be all the time. It made me realize, before I even knew it, that each student learns at different speeds, rates, and skill levels. That seems obvious, but not all teachers get to this point.

Additionally, I go home and experience the need for systems and structure with my wife. She struggles with a “fly by the seat of your pants” approach to living. While I am pretty linear in my thinking and fairly structured, I learned to change some of my unstructured life to routines. Why does all this matter to me teaching today?

I am a better teacher today because of these experiences. I feel that students who struggle with attention or writing skills or any learning difference can succeed in my classroom due to these experiences. I use strategies that I learn from my home life and prior school life at Seattle Prep to benefit these students. By writing on the board, using verbal cues, group work with movement, and scheduling one on one conferences, I can lead students with learning differences to feel more success in the classroom.

Slang in the Classroom? Nah dawg – formal style is where it’s at

In Judith Meece and Denise Daniels’ book entitled Child and Adolescent Development for Educators, chapter five outlines the development of language in children and as they head into adolescence. While much of this chapter provides nice context for my future child – my wife is six months pregnant – as a high school teacher, it fails to grasp apply for most of the chapter. Yet Meece and Daniels address a small part on adolescence language that grabbed my attention. They state: “By adolescence, students are extremely skilled at adapting their language to different situations” (Meece 274). While this is the hope of many educators, I find that it is becoming less and less true.

It is essential for students to be able to change their use of language and formal style in different environments. Not everyone agrees with this, but as long as society holds certain expectations for job interviews and work environments, it is essential. While students at Seattle Prep understand this to a degree, there are those who feel that they should be able to express themselves however they wish in school. Especially since their parents pay so much money to attend our school. I am not bothered personally by this style or language use (more informal), but I do feel that students need to learn how to switch their formality on and off at appropriate times.

So how do we help them practice this? I believe there are a couple ways in the classroom to accomplish this. One way is through group presentations. Currently in my junior Collegio, the students are working together on 1920s presentations, as that is our current unit of study. The students present on one of the following: Harlem Renaissance art, Harlem Renaissance music, prohibition, Scopes Trial, rise of the KKK, changing role of women, women’s suffrage, the rise of the automobile, consumerism, popular culture, or the Palmer Raids. While each group uses technology to enhance their lesson and must practice group skills, the true evaluation is on their presentation. Students must learn to adapt their language and style to become more formal. Through this process, students practice essentially for their future encounters in the workplace and in interviews. And in the end, they are agreeing with Meece and Daniels without even knowing it!

Student Group Presentation: Consumerism and Rise of Technology

Long Term Planning

Last week provided an eclectic mix of semester activities for me and my classes at Seattle Prep. As I finished grading finals and last minute assignments from the previous semester, I also attempted to lead my students in a new direction as the second semester began. This tenuous mix created a feeling of uncertainty and additional stress, but also provided a great opportunity to head into the next semester with a feeling of organization – which doesn’t always occur in this job.

While Seattle Prep provides teachers with a grading day and a week full of time to grade as students only have finals for an entire week, it becomes a little difficult to get this done during basketball season and the week fills up with meetings. I found myself continually sitting in necessary, and even helpful, meetings throughout finals week. While this helped prepare me for the next unit in both freshmen and junior Collegios, it also took valuable grading time away. As the clock ticked toward the grade posting deadline, I found myself trying to balance many aspects of my job at once. While it can feel difficult, I believe that the mix of a new semester and finishing an old semester can provide just enough balance to make it possible.

By introducing new content and plans for each unit in my classes, I really didn’t have new things to grade in each class. This allowed me to finish up the grading from first semester and complete my grade comments in plenty of time. It also kept me focused on the long term plan in each class which will greatly benefit me as I move forward.

I find that long term planning or planning out the reading for each unit (like a month at a time), really helps me feel intentional about lesson plans and extremely organized. For example, the juniors will be completing group projects about topics in the 1920s ranging from the Harlem Renaissance to women’s suffrage to prohibition. While they complete these presentations, we will also be going over some additional history material. At the beginning of the semester, I handed them a calendar which essentially plans out all of February and thus the current unit. It provides them and myself with a road map for the current unit and benefits everyone in my opinion. This is also why I feel so great about my new class this semester: senior seminar. With 78 seniors and three co-teachers alongside me, it would be insane to not enter this new class without proper preparation. By meeting during one of our free periods for months and months, we planned out the first three months of class time and thus the class arrived with less stress and more clarity. I hope to continue my progress toward long term planning as the semester continues so that I can feel organized and provide a clear map for all my students.

The Wizard of Oz, Showcase Showdown, and Finals Week

The first two weeks in January always seem a little hectic around Seattle Prep. I often feel a little overwhelmed and crazed as many aspects of my life at Prep come crashing into one large convergence zone. As a high school basketball coach, January means the heart of our season. As a freshmen class moderator, January means getting ASB officers rallied around an idea to unite the class. As the coordinator for the National History Day competition, January means collecting papers, judging papers and a whole lot of organization. And finally as a teacher, January means finals week!

Students tend to stress out a bit more around finals week at Prep. Maybe that is an understatement. In an attempt to prepare them, while also teaching my showcase lesson for Seattle Pacific, the first two weeks in January felt a tad more chaotic this year.

While the showcase lesson can be stressful – mostly due to the amount of paperwork required for it – I really enjoyed teaching the lesson. While working on a unit in American History around multiculturalism, I chose to teach my showcase lesson on Populism and its connection to the unit. Students read the Populist Platform in preparation for class and then connected the ideas of the Populist Party to the themes of the unit (which focused mostly on Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Eastern European Americans in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries): 

• Different paths to America
• Traditional cultural values v. modern American values
• Racism, displacement, alienation within American society
• American dream – ideal and real

While opening the lesson with a review of Populism and its fascinating connection to the Wizard of Oz, the discussion

A Parable on Populism

 centered around relating the party to these themes. Students did a great job and aside from feeling a little rushed, the whole experience turned out to be very rewarding.

Yet as soon as I finished that lesson, my focus turned to helping students prepare for their finals. As a proponent of student-directed learning, I left the brainstorming up to them. In both my freshmen and junior classes, students generated lists of people, places, events, and concepts that they felt were important to know for the final. This allowed them to be actively engaged in the process and also helped them figure out what was most important to study. Aside from their obsession with knowing what EXACTLY is on each test, the review process went smoothly and helped students prepare. At least I hope. I won’t really know until all those tests are graded!