Introduction (EDU 6524)

My name is Brian Elsner and I am taking this course as part of the Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) portion of the Alternative Routes to Certification program at Seattle Pacific University. I am 31 years old and happily married to my wife Dana for almost two years now. On May 2 we welcomed our first child, Lincoln, into the world and it has been a fantastic ride so far!

My son Lincoln and I

I will be entering my fourth year teaching at Seattle Prep. I teach in the Social Studies department and serve a number of different roles on campus. We have a class called Collegio for freshmen, sophomores, and juniors that is an integrated English and History course. I teach both freshmen and juniors. Additionally, I helped design the curriculum for a senior course that is now one year old called Senior Seminar. My particular seminar is Ecology, Economics and Ethics and focuses on the global water crisis, while serving as a capstone to the four year experience at Seattle Prep. It focuses on the ideals of a Jesuit education and how students can become agents of change in the world. As I helped in the formation of this course, I used backward design to develop this curriculum. While this proved to be rewarding, working with three other teachers proved to be very challenging (especially the one who said he didn’t believe in backward design). I am looking forward to seeing how it compares to this class as well.

 

Additionally I am the Associate Head Coach of our boys varsity basketball team, serve as National History Day coordinator, freshmen class moderator, tech committee member and on a diversity committee as well. This keeps me very busy at Seattle Prep! I completed the ARC certificate portion this school year and look forward to completing my Masters this summer.

Professional Development Plan

A professional development plan allows teachers to continue reflecting and considering the same issues that we tackled in our certification and Master’s programs at Seattle Pacific. While many teachers get certified and then move on (and maybe take a deep breath and a needed summer break), this plan will allow me to consider how I can improve as I work toward a professional certificate in a few years.

Here is my current professional development plan:

Professional Standard / Criteria		Professional Development Activity	Observable Evidence of Positively Impacting Student Learning
Effective TeachingDemonstrate the knowledge and skills which ensure student learning.
1a	Use instructional strategies that make learning meaningful and show positive impact on student learning.	I will continue to utilize Robert Marzano’s instructional strategies in my classroom. I will ask students to complete anonymous surveys for the effectiveness of these strategies and evaluate their work in groups or partners versus individual work for evidence as well. Lastly, I will research other instructional strategies as they become relevant (either in new books or on credible web sites).	By reviewing the students answers to surveys, I will get a good idea of the positive impact on their learning. Also, as I assess their work from different groups or partners, I can find ways to adapt these strategies to ensure positive impact.
1b	Use a variety of assessment strategies and data to monitor and improve instruction.	I will continue to assess my students through a wide variety of ways including tests, quizzes, written work, presentations, papers, discussion boards and digital narratives. I will search for new, innovative ways to assess students. I will compare old assessments to new assessments to see if there is a common trait for the class and individual students in ways that they may struggle.	Through the data I collect from assessments, I will be able to tell the aspects of my lessons that need work. I will continue to push students to answer higher level thinking questions and provide timely feedback on these assessments so students can apply the learning.
1c	Use appropriate classroom management principles, processes and practices to foster a safe, positive, student-focused learning environment.
1d	Design and/or adapt challenging curriculum that is based on the diverse needs of each student.	I will review all 504 plans for students with learning differences and make appropriate accommodations. I will choose instructional strategies that vary each week so as to help students of all abilities and learning styles. Lastly, I will survey students on questions like computer access, preferred type of assessment and more throughout the year to see how best to help students engage with content.	Based upon the results of the surveys, I will change instruction as to help students improve. By reviewing the results of assessments of students with different preferences or abilities, I can ensure all students are improving.
1e	Demonstrate cultural sensitivity in teaching and in relationships with students, families, and community members.
1f	Integrate technology into instruction and assessment.	I will continue to search for new 2.0 technology that will enhance the learning process. In particular, I will use digital narratives next year and the Moodle discussion board once every other unit. I will also have students practice blogging during a unit next year.	By assessing the quality of their work on each assignment, I will see students get engaged with the material. Additionally I will ask them formally and informally how each 2.0 technology helped them learn in the unit.
1g	Inform, involve, and collaborate with families and community members as partners in each student’s educational process, including using information about student achievement and performance.
Professional DevelopmentDemonstrate the knowledge and skills which ensure professional development.
2a	Evaluate the effects of your teaching through feedback and reflection.	I will ask the principal and my department head to observe me before official observations next year. I will also meet with my teaching partners to ensure my teaching practices are effective. Lastly, I will ask students to provide feedback three times next year through formal surveys.	I will make adjustments in my teaching style and technique based upon feedback. I will then review results of assessments after the changes to ensure positive impact is taking place.
2b	Use professional standards and district criteria to assess professional performance, and plan and implement appropriate growth activities.
2c	Remain current in subject area(s), theories, practice, research and ethical practice.	I will be attending a professional conference of Jesuit educators called JSEA Colloquium this June. I will be reviewing Gilder Lehrman for continuing resources in the area of history and take future summer conferences specific to history topics. I will also be working on a Diversity team for our school’s diversity plan.	I will take specific ideas for lessons and/or classroom ideas back to Seattle Prep. Through my using these, I will have data from student work on their effectiveness.
Professional ContributionsDemonstrate professional contributions to the improvement of the school, community, and the profession.
3a	Advocate for curriculum, instruction, and learning environments that meet the diverse needs of each student.
3b	Participate collaboratively in school improvement activities and contribute to collegial decision-making.	I will continue to serve on the Diversity committee and the Technology committee. I will not only serve on these committees, but be an active member. I will continue to serve as the National History Day coordinator and as the Freshman Class Moderator.	Through these various roles, I get to interact with students outside of the classroom. This allows me to build positive teacher-student relationships which will lead to students working harder in the classroom. Also, by working with teachers on committees I contribute to the students positive learning in other classes as well as mine.

The essential part of any plan or any proof of effective teaching is the positive impact I have on student learning. It isn’t just enough to say, “hey, I know I have an impact” even if I feel that way and receive great feedback from students. I need to have the proof. This professional development plan makes me consider how to do this. I think that the work students produce show the positive impact, but it can also be somewhat limiting. When I show how students engage the content through their writing or answers to a test or digital narrative, it does show a positive impact. Yet I also need to remember to view their results over the course of the year on similar assessments, assignments, and lessons so that I can ensure they are improving. This plan made me remember that and will make me a more effective teacher.

Draft Professional Development Plan – Elsner

New Assignments (May 17-23)

Juniors and seniors at Seattle Prep just completed their second to last week of school. While most schools have seniors finish early for graduation and other ceremonies, we also include our juniors due to a unique program called Matteo Ricci. Years ago Seattle Prep forged a partnership with Seattle University to create a program where juniors at Seattle Prep could start their college experience at Seattle U in a hybrid senior year/freshmen year of college. This program continues and this year twelve students will be commencing. Thus the juniors finish at the same time. While seniors are mentally out the door and quite a challenge to teach due to feelings of senioritis, the juniors are still quite engaged. This allowed me to try a couple new assignments that I really enjoy.

The first is an interview of a family member about the Vietnam War. As part of the Vietnam unit, we incorporate a number of different media and instructional strategies to make the unit as engaging as possible. After watching the film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, as well as listening to a veteran speak to the entire junior class, my students felt like they had a better grasp of the content and the era in general. The last part of the unit required students to pick a member of their family who lived during the Vietnam War. They do not have to be a veteran or have served, simply alive during the time and have some memories. Students really enjoy this assignment and end up telling me how much they learned about their family. This year I even had a student interview her father who was a South Vietnamese soldier fighting with the U.S. during the war.

In addition to this assignment, I asked my students to complete a digital narrative on any history topic of interest to them from the Cold War, Vietnam era, or Civil Rights Movement (our last three units in American History). This assignment originated from my Education Technology class I participated in over the winter. I introduced it to them as part of a lesson on the origins of the Cold War and gave them an example that I completed. I am excited to view all of them. Here is an example of the digital narrative.

http://voicethread.com/share/1164765/

I think that assignments like these two that ask students to do things they don’t normally do all year allow them to remain engaged as they are getting close to the end of the year. It also allows for great creativity to come out in students who may not succeed in typical academic ways.

Time to Adjust (May 9-16)

After spending the last week at home with my newborn son and my wife, the adjustment to the teaching world again proved to be interesting to say the least. My first challenge was my desire to be at school again. I absolutely love my job and feel that I will do it for the rest of my life without question, but things changed a bit when my son was born. People told me about it, but it is never quite the same as my own experience. After arriving on campus, the reality of my workload hit me immediately as I was greeted with assessments collected while gone and impending deadlines at SPU.

I wrote blog posts earlier in the year describing the difficulty of balancing it all between SPU, family, coaching basketball, and teaching. Now add in being a parent! Not an easy task. The biggest challenge in the first week is the time at home when I used to complete SPU assignments or grading. All of a sudden I have a wife who has been home all day with my son. Regardless of whether she needs help, I want to spend time with him! This proves to be quite a challenge.

After speaking with some fellow teachers who went through the “new parent/teacher” routine, I learned that I essentially will simply become more efficient and direct with the time I have. I am not sure how I will make it happen, but I am confident I will adjust. In fact, I need to go get some grading done right now.

Lincoln Beaudry Elsner (May 1 – 8)

This past week has been crazy! My wife Dana gave birth to our son Lincoln Beaudry Elsner on May 2nd at 2:04 p.m.

Lincoln Beaudry Elsner

 While I took a week off from school to be home with my wife and new son, it did not mean that school stopped. I know, weird? With teaching partners covering classes and fellow history teachers filling in, I kept in touch with what happened at Prep. I didn’t intentionally check email too much, but turns out having a baby does involve some down time. (They actually sleep!). I find it easier in many ways to stay in touch with my classes and provide some guidance with lessons while I am gone rather than just letting my co-teachers fill the time, even if they offer. This way when I return the transition will be that much easier.

Educator: Not a Classroom Job (April 24 – May 1)

As I prepare for life with a new child and all the fun/chaos that brings, I find myself trying to prepare for not being at school for a week. While this can be both challenging and puzzling in many ways – how do I prepare for a date I don’t know? – I find myself getting ready for one of my non-classroom responsibilities. As the coordinator for the National History Day paper at Seattle Prep, I get the privilege of working with those students who advance past our internal competition. Despite not knowing whether I will make it to the day (Saturday, May 1^st) and trying to find back up teachers to cover if my wife goes into labor, I am excited for the students competing.

After students complete their own History Day paper in January, Seattle Prep holds a competition for the top 32 papers in the junior class. These papers, as well as their classmates, went through topic selection, thesis creation, outlines, drafts, revisions, and more revisions to create a fantastic end product. These 32 students who advanced were placed in groups where teachers from different disciplines got together and judged them anonymously based on the state criteria (historical accuracy, writing style, and use of sources). From there, 12 advanced to the regional competition where they competed against other area high school students.

The regional competition is out of our hands, but we still have great success at Seattle Prep. This year the regional judges chose five of our papers to finish in the six total that advance to state! It was a great job by our students.

The five students and I met up at the state competition on the morning of Saturday, May 1^st as they prepared for their interviews. Each student met with three judges (mostly college professors) and answered questions pertaining to their papers. The students enjoyed their experience and gained valuable skills for the future in the process. As we reached the judging round, the students were excited. One student earned 6^th in state and another earned 4^th. Unlike last year, no students advanced to the national competition but it was a great result for Seattle Prep.

The event showed me again that my role as an educator is not to sit in a classroom. My first and foremost role is to build relationships and challenge students to become better people and to love learning. These five juniors showed me they are on their way to both.

Link to Washington’s National History Day site:
http://www.wshs.org/historyday/default.aspx

Outside the Classroom (April 18-23)

This past week provided a couple different opportunities for me as a teacher that don’t fit into a normal work week. In celebration of Earth Day, our school joins together for an all-school Day of Service in the neighborhood surrounding Seattle Prep. The following day, on Friday, I joined our principal and a few other fellow teachers at a day long conference on Cultural Competence. While both days provided different experiences, they both allowed for great professional growth.

Earth Day at Seattle Prep

As students get older at Seattle Prep, they tend to bemoan the prospect of working outside on Earth Day. After experiencing the laborious nature of pulling ivy and blackberry from the neighborhood (mostly at Interlaken Park), they strive to do anything else! With this in mind – and last year being a rainy day – it inevitably makes for a less than exciting day in many cases. As teachers we feel like we are herding students back and then trying anything to get them to work for just a couple hours. While I went into the day with tempered expectations, I soon learned that just when you don’t expect the best – students surprise you.

The group of juniors I supervised and worked with on Earth Day provided great energy and worked extremely hard.

We cleared a nice section of ivy and blackberry to return the land to its natural state alongside workers from EarthCorps, a local non-profit that works in restoring natural habitats. The second part of our day involved moving piles of mulch to cover the area. When we completed the work, all of us could stare and be amazed at the work we accomplished. The students worked well together and really enjoyed their day. Yet the best part was that we were one group (about 12 students and myself) among 50 or so groups total doing this same work! We literally and physically changed the landscape of our area for the better! I felt overwhelmed and proud to be working at a school involved in this activity and to be with students who truly respected the world around them enough to not complain and get the work done.

The following day I traveled to the Cultural Competency training where I gained some great professional development to use in my classroom. The training centered around being able to understand the different perspectives and cultures of the students in our classroom. While I didn’t gain anything new or groundbreaking in terms of the material, the training did provide some great activities to use in helping students understand each others’ various perspectives and cultures. I also thought of my Diversity in Education course and James Banks’ views of Multicultural Education. This training and the work I did in that class made me reflect on my own teaching. Banks describes three different approaches to multicultural education in order of significance and importance: contributions approach, additive approach, and transformative approach. Do I simply speak about various cultural groups contributions or do I include all perspectives throughout units I teach? This is a perfect time to reflect on this dilemma as I begin a new unit for freshmen year. The unit involves the reading of Bless Me, Ultima and the Age of Exploration. I want to work toward a unit that doesn’t celebrate Christopher Columbus and other explorers, but examines the perspectives of all involved including the indigenous people who lived in the New World before Columbus arrived. If I can get students to understand all points of view in this era, I am working toward a transformative experience.

Parents and Student Voice (April 12-17)

The Seattle Pacific Alternative Route to Certification program provides me with a number of ideas and a whole lot of paperwork in order to be a certifiable teacher. Not to mention getting a Master’s Degree! Yet in the process of sorting through documents, taking suggestions from observers, and classes upon classes, some of the ideas came to life in my teaching. This week I used two very different examples of ideas that came from this program that improved my teaching.

The first idea came from the Education Technology course I took back in the fall. In that class, we needed to create a Digital Narrative documenting our belief in the use of technology in education. While I believed all my statements in that particular assignment (I linked to it here in this post), I didn’t necessarily think they would be put into action this year.

http://voicethread.com/share/802748/

I used Moodle for a discussion with my class earlier during a Civil War unit and now I wanted to put the Digital Narrative into action. I assigned my class to complete a Digital Narrative using VoiceThread. They need to choose a topic or person from any of the last three units in American History (Cold War, Vietnam and Civil Rights). My site coordinator liked the idea in that it will allow students to really synthesize their learning. I believe that anytime students can learn in a format unusual or unique to what they are used to, a little more learning takes place. This is my hope for this assignment. (See my example in this post as well).

http://voicethread.com/share/1083480/

While the Digital Narrative will hopefully be a great success, another idea from SPU already proved to be a hit with parents. I recently wrote a short newsletter on the Cold War unit as we began in class and sent it via email to all my parents of juniors. I not only received responses from four parents, but the principal received an email from a parent as well on how appreciative they were of the effort I put in. I realize that with just a little extra work I can really get parents engaged in the classroom, even if they can’t come in physically!

Art and Science of Teaching with ELL Students

When reading the text entitled Practical Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners by Ellen M. Curtin, it became quite obvious that good teaching equates to good teaching whether ELL students are in my classroom or not. Unfortunately for most first year teachers, it proves to be very difficult to feel like a good teacher. This isn’t to say that in my third year of teaching I have it all figured out. Far from it. Yet I do feel that my experiences – including failures – helped me learn how to become a better teacher. Part of success in teaching is the art and part of the success is the science. When a teacher combines both, he or she can reach and improve performance of all students, including ELL students.

Curtin describes the art of teaching in chapter six with her opening example of Mr. O’Connor. Struggling to find a way to explain mixtures to his students, Mr. O’Connor decides to adapt his lesson in class in order to have the concepts make sense to his students. While Curtin states that this should be built into a lesson, I don’t believe that is the case. I do think that as a teacher I can brainstorm possibilities, but this is the art of teaching. Not all teachers can do this well. Like any other profession, I believe there are those who have a natural talent for teaching. This is the art. When I find myself in a class that isn’t going well, I adapt the lesson not only in the examples I use, but in the entire lesson itself. If students are sleepy, I will group them together or find ways to get them moving. If students are too energetic, some quiet writing and then sharing as a class can get them calmed down. While a teacher can predict some of this in lesson planning, most of it is done naturally and spontaneously in the classroom. This can be applied to ELL students as well. If those students seem to be struggling with a concept, then find a way to make it more applicable. This is good teaching.

The science of teaching involves all the work we prepare before a lesson and in our teacher preparation programs. Curtin provides a great way to involve ELL students in our preparation. In chapter four, she gave an example of a lesson plan with a column added to include strategies for ELL students. This would be the science of teaching. There are strategies and types of learning that will benefit all students, but even more so ELL students. In chapter five, Curtin highlights a few of these options including think-pair-share, cooperative learning, jigsaws, and round-robin. She also writes about opportunities for kinesthetic learning that may benefit ELL students. After providing an example of a teacher who utilizes these strategies, she writes: “the teacher in this scenario demonstrated interactive teaching by incorporating cooperative learning and learning centers, and using hands-on strategies that greatly enhanced learning for all students, which reduced the anxiety for the English Language Learner” (Curtin, 91).

By combining the art and science of teaching and using effective strategies, we can become teachers who improve students’ success. While we should include ELL students in our lesson plans and think specifically of ways to enhance their experience, I believe the focus should simply be on strategies for good teaching. When this is done for all students, ELL students will benefit in the process.

References

Curtin, E. (2009). Practical Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners. Columbus: Pearson.

Spring Break? Organization Time! (April 3-10)

Spring break provides needed relief for both students and teachers. In the past when Spring break comes too early, the last part of the year seems to drag on forever and ever. When it comes too late, the time before the break seems to last far too long. This year fortunately spring break came at the perfect time for a number of reasons. For me, the biggest benefit came in the form of a time to organize.

When I am working through lessons, completing SPU classes, and coaching basketball (not to mention being a husband to a eight month pregnant wife!), organizing my office and paperwork falls to the wayside. With all my grading caught up before the break and very little to do for Seattle Pacific, spring break provided such a great chance for me to start fresh. I began by simply going through my old lessons, handouts, and papers from my classes for an entire day in my office. As depressing as it can sound to spend a day during break at school, it actually reinvigorates me to get this organized. After throwing out what I didn’t need and filing the rest, I felt really great about my desk and classes.

As I begin the home stretch of the school year, I know that in many ways life is going to get crazier (a baby on the way!). At the same time, I feel really prepared and ready for these last two months due to the organizing I did over break. This is a good thing to remember for me as I finish this year and start next year. If I can keep up with my organization, I will have more time to focus on lessons and being a better teacher.