Interview Reflection

What was it like to be interviewed?

What was it like to be an interviewer?

What challenges did you encounter?

OCW

Reflection Memo

Friday

It's been a tough week sleepwise. Up until yesterday, my son, Kessler, was running a fever, which meant many middle-of-the-night comforting sessions. So it was a minor miracle when, after going to bed around nine, I awoke to see these digits on the clock. Could it be I'd slept through the night? A good start to the day.

Formal Reflection #3

My blog has been a bit silent today, but fear not -- I've been thinking and writing! Most of the day I've spent on my Action Research Project, and I'm feeling pretty good that I have a solid draft going into tomorrow. I'll need to formalize my Works Cited and internal citations and also want to talk to Kathleen about my Implementation and Data sections, but I think I'll only have small changes to make.

I was reflecting last night on this work and it's importance. There are a LOT of inspiring teachers at this institute with a LOT of inspiring stories to tell. Despite my generally reserved countenance, every time Don gives us a peak into the work he is doing with his students makes me want to leap out of my chair and say, "I want to do that!" And I think that when I first arrived at the institute -- or really whenever I embark on a new professional learning opportunity -- I tend to be on the hunt for a magic bullet that will take me from my practice to teaching that is really worth sharing. I am, in a word, impatient. I feel very strongly that my kids deserve the best -- because they're the best. And it can be disheartening to know that there are other teachers out there doing great things that my students aren't experiencing.

But I've got to learn to slow down. Just as I don't expect my students to become award-winning authors overnight, I can't expect in the five years I've been teaching to be the best I'm going to be. What's important is that I'm getting better. And even more important that my team is getting better. I think that the work I've done here pushes us a little bit further in our current direction. This last spring our school experienced quite the kerfuffle over the enforcement of our dress code. Many parents showed up at a town meeting wanting blood. They painted a pretty negative picture of our school, and it made many of my wonderful colleagues feel as though they weren't valued by the community. While there was a lot of hurt, however, it was also a wake up call -- we need to let the community know about the great things we are doing. Part of that, I think, is demonstrating that we have scholarly research to back up what we are doing in our classrooms. Next year, our team will be doing a lot of new things and my guess is we'll get some challenges from administrators and parents. The work that I've done here will help provide a research-based rationale for what we're doing as well as give us a tool to determine if what we've been doing is successful or not. Should we be challenged, we'll have those items to fall back on -- a safety net of kinds.

So while I didn't necessarily find a magic bullet or even a silver bullet, I did find a bullet. And it's kinda shiny. (Then again, maybe I'd better find a better metaphor...)

Formal Blog #2

Today, as I hope I made clear in my video, my ideas about how I hope to use my remaining time at the institute coalesced. Here is my new learning plan template. Though I did not have a chance to blog about my work in the afternoon, I spent the majority of it on the Redefining Engagement module, which I think will go a long way toward helping me complete the literature review portion of my Action Research plan. Here are my notes on the module so far.

Designing PLP Guided Module

My school experimented with PLPs last year but I think we all felt that they were very unsuccessful. We attempted to base them around the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens, hoping that it would serve as a springboard for discussions about values and goals. I never really liked the book and found that students didn't either. They saw reading and discussing the book, as well as the "PLP" we set up to go along with it, as a chore. And, frankly, that's how I had seen PLPs until this session. I gained a better understanding of the rationale behind PLPs. Where once I, along with the majority of my colleagues, saw PLPs as yet another poorly-thought-out mandate from Montpelier, I now realize that PLPs are really about helping students become more successful in their learning. I really like that Act 77 emphasizes that PLPs are intended to be forward thinking rather than as a mere portfolio of work designed to meet prescribed goals. The module we looked at contained several great examples of what PLPs can be as well as the process by which teachers helped students create them. I really wish my team was here to work on PLPs. Perhaps next year we'll be able to attend the institute together and work on PLP design.

In addition to developing as a teacher this week I find myself learning about myself as a learner. Part of the reason that I so enjoyed this module was that I had an opportunity to talk with my fellow "students." I'd always pictured myself as a guy who liked to be working alone. Turns out, that's not the case. I find myself really craving more structure and more opportunities to talk to others. Which might be why personalized learning so baffles me. I feel like one of my missions as a teacher is helping students gain collaboration skills. But how do you do this if everyone is working on something different? How do you balance classroom community with personalization?

Exit Ticket 6/28

This Learning Plan Template reflects my latest incarnation of what I might accomplish this week. However, I'm not at the moment feeling particularly positive about what I've placed there. I've completed two modules and begun a third and I don't really feel like I'm learning. Instead, I keep encountering information and ideas I've already come across before. For example, I completed a chart almost identical to the one in the Introduction to the Middle Grades Concept in a Nature and Needs class I took last fall. The advisory module seemed geared largely toward convincing educators of the value of advisory, but I'm already convinced of that. The same seems true of the interdisciplinary teaming module. So if my goal is to gather resources to bring back to my team that will help us in the work we began earlier in the summer, I don't think I've made much progress. And I'm concerned I won't. I'm not sure how to proceed...

Or at least that's how I was feeling before you (Kathleen) just stopped by to chat about sending me some additional resources regarding advisory. I really think my school is missing a huge opportunity by not leveraging advisory, so perhaps those resources will allow me to dig deeper and design a project around how to improve it. So if my first goal is to develop a goal, perhaps I have made some progress. I look forward to delving deeper into those resources tomorrow.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, our time here seems like an immersion into what personalized learning might very well look like. To be honest, it's been very uncomfortable for me. There are, of course, aspects of my life in which I very easily set goals and establish steps to reach them. One recent example is my guitar playing. I've been strumming for about eight years now and felt like I'd reached a plateau. So I decided I wanted to learn some finger picking. So I went online, found some resources I thought could help me, and now have five or six songs under my belt.

But somehow this is different. Maybe it's because teaching is WAY more complicated than guitar playing, but I've really been struggling with how to find a focus area for where I want to improve my practice. In retrospect, I think I would have benefited from some scaffolded goal-setting activities or yesterday so that I could really hit the ground running. I would have liked to have had some model goals that I could borrow from as well as more examples of what individuals and teams have achieved at their time at MGI.

In reflecting on the challenges I've faced with personalized learning, it strikes me that when I begin it in my classroom I'm going to need to provide a LOT of scaffolding. Students will need to be taught about goal setting. Students need to explore what makes a good goal and how to break down a goal into smaller steps. Students need many, many examples of goals they could set for themselves before they begin creating new ones.

In short, this has been hard for me so far -- but I'm optimistic about tomorrow.

Advisory Module

I recognized my school in Brown's piece on advisories: "Unfortunately, over time many advisories became little more than a place for teachers to take attendance, pass on school announcements, and give the students a few minutes for study and completing homework -- just like the old, traditional homeroom. In most cases, such situations are due to not having identified clear goals and sufficiently planned ways to achieve those goals." That, in a nutshell, seems to be what happened at Woodstock. Having surmounted what is probably the biggest obstacle for some schools -- time -- our advisories have succumbed to a lack of direction. Advisories in my school are used for any number of things, few of which relate to meeting the social and emotional needs of adolescent learners. In fact, Woodstock made headlines this spring by using some advisory time to admonish girls to adhere to our rather outdated dress code while their male counterparts played games.

So it seems the first "action step" in revamping our advisory program is to decide what it is we want to achieve with it. Brown lists a lot of possible goals, far too many, I think, to achieve in 5 25-minute blocks a week. Of the ones he listed, the ones that appeal to me the most would be:

1) Ensuring that every student is well known by at least one adult;

2) Ensuring that every student feels like a valued member of a small team

3) Assisting in the social and emotional development of young adolescents

But identifying goals will probably be the easy part. Much harder, I think, is to design a curriculum or possible activities that teachers can use to achieve those goals. And this is where I get a bit lost. The module contained several links to sites with get-to-know you activities, but those can only go so far. At a certain point, an advisory has to go beyond mere team building if they are going to truly meet students' social and emotional needs. In his podcast, Wellbacher mentioned how amazed he was with students' willingness to open up about themselves in advisory.  That's the kind of advisory I want! But how do you achieve? How do you get kids to open up to you? How do you make the transition between having fun and building a team and talking about serious matters? I've never been able to make that shift, and I don't really know where to turn for help.

Project Based Learning Discussion

While working in the hallway I found myself drawn to a discussion of PBL. I recently took a class on PBL and couldn't help but join. There were lots of questions about how to convert a "traditional" unit into a PBL unit. I can't say I provided answers, but it was very nice to hear of others' struggles with PBL. Obviously, the draw of PBL is all the great stories of increase student engagement and achievement -- not the trials and travails that it takes to get there. It was also good to connect with colleagues after staring at my computer for so long.

Introduction to the Middle Grades Concept

I'm a little confused about what, exactly, the middle grades concept is. As described in the module readings, it seems to advocate for the creation of schools that meet the physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and moral/ethical needs of adolescents. But what about this is "middle"? As Lipsitz and West write in "What Makes a Good School," "There isn't anything int he [National Forum to Accelerate Middle School Reform] that is exclusive to the middle grades; we believe our vision applies to all schools teaching all grade levels." Beane and Lipke seem to agree, writing, "Obviously, most components of the middle school concept are appropriate for any grade level." They go on to explain their rationale for applying the "middle school" moniker to the idea: "Why, then, would advocates of the concept specifically tie it to the middle grades? Quite simply because they intended to implement it as an alternative to the impersonal, inequitable, and irrelevant structures and curriculum that characterized many junior high schools." Does this mean we are okay settling with "impersonal, inequitable, and irrelevant" high schools?

My point here is not to argue semantics -- whatever we call this concept is fine by me because, clearly, it's what teachers and schools need to be doing. However, I think at some point our high school colleagues need to join the middle school dialogue about how to meet the needs of their learners. High school students, after all, are adolescents; in fact, brain science tells us that for many people the prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until they reach 25 years of age. Seen in that light, 15-18 is more the "middle" of adolescence than 12-14, which is when students traditionally attend "middle" school. At the moment, though, most high schools I have seen seem to be bridges between compulsory public education and college, much like junior highs were considered bridges between elementary and high schools in prior decades. In this way, high schools might more appropriately be considered "junior colleges." After all, high school teachers are divided into departments and often teach in isolation from other disciplines, much like college professors.

But instigating a paradigm shift in high schools seems a bit beyond the purview of this institute. What I can change, of course, is what I do in my own classroom. After completing the Young Adolescent Organizational Structures chart, I feel confident that my team and I are doing much to meet the needs of our young learners, and have plans to do even more next year. Of the areas in which we could improve, I think the most glaring is in meeting the emotional/psychological needs of our students. We are not leveraging our advisory time in a way that helps give students a sense of belonging and safety. Some action steps in improving this might be to compile a plethora of advisory activities and somehow publish them electronically so that advisory teachers can easily access them, perhaps on a Google site.

Three Pillars Discussion

The focus of the discussion has been on flexible pathways. It seems like these pathways are what people are having trouble wrapping their heads around, particularly in areas like math. How do you provide different ways, for example, for a student to demonstrate that they understand probability? Our facilitators are providing some pretty inspiring anecdotes about things they are doing in their classroom. One teacher from Essex was describing a block in the day devoted entirely to student-directed projects based on questions they develop at the beginning of the year. She has students in internships out in the community learning about things that are their passions. Wow!

But...what's missing here is how you prepare students for this type of thing. I have a tendency to just jump into big ideas. I dream up an idea for a project and throw it at kids. I don't, though, dream up the steps I need to prepare students for the project. That was the case last year when I tried project-based learning. I had a good idea, or so I thought, but I hadn't helped students practice the skills they needed to work collaboratively with one another. As a result, the project fell flat.

This year, my team and I plan on experimenting with "passion projects." It'll be the first time that we'll be doing something like that as a coordinated team. I'm excited because it means that we'll have to work together to plan the project as well as talk to one another about what is going well and what needs work. I'm hoping that this small project will grow into something larger; it might help us springboard into implementing flexible pathways in the future.

Monday Exit Ticket

I've filled out this Learning Plan Template as best I can, but it's still pretty incomplete. I don't know how to take my elevator pitch and turn it into a smaller goal. My pitch seems like it is my goal. I'm also very unsure of how I will use my time at the institute after tomorrow. I know that there are two modules that I'd like to complete tomorrow, but then what? How will I spend my time? I don't really know in part because I'm still pretty confused about the expectations for the institute. I don't really understand what I need produce in order to earn credit.

The second part of this blog is supposed to address the question, "How has my thinking change today?" I'm not really sure how to answer this. My thinking hasn't really changed. I've spent a considerable amount of time this year taking three of the classes needed to earn the Middle Level endorsement, and I came in wondering how this institute would help add to what I have already learned. After today, I'm still wondering that.

McCormick Biography

Matthew McCormick is a 7th-grade teacher who will soon begin his third year at Woodstock Union Middle

School. McCormick's path to the classroom was filled with zigs, zags, and zip-a-dee-doos. After graduating from Claremont McKenna College in 2005 with a degree in the lucrative field of American Studies, he donned a reporter's hat, covering the trials and tribulations of communities in Virginia and then New Hampshire and Vermont. Soon, however, McCormick decided that a life covering selectboard meetings wasn't for him. Feeling a bit lost, he became an early practitioner of the so-called quarter-life-crisis, moving across the country to Montana, where he sought employment in a variety of jobs that, besides their American location, had nothing to do with his college major: ski lift operator, trail worker, landscaper, gun store clerk.

It was while McCormick was at this last job that he stumbled into the classroom as a substitute teacher in the schools of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeast Montana. He found that he very much enjoyed the enthusiasm and silliness of young kids. In addition, his future wife had recently graduated from a teacher preparation program at Montana State University. After a year in the classroom, she was staring down a summer vacation -- the first of her adult life. "Summer vacation!?" McCormick thought to himself. "That sounds awesome!" Plus, he figured going back to school could help further the adventure he'd started in Montana, where he'd reveled in the state's wilderness backpacking, fishing, and skiing. What's wilder than Montana? Alaska. So in the summer of 2010, McCormick began a one-year teacher preparation program through the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

McCormick quickly found out that there is more to teaching than summer vacation. Standards, lesson plans, assessments, oh my! But in addition to the work involved, McCormick also found that there was great reward, particularly in the relationships he was able to forge with young people. After a year's preparation, McCormick found himself in his own classroom at North Pole Middle School in North Pole, AK.

At first, he thought of middle school as a stepping stone, a place where he could get his feet wet, prove his mettle, and earn a position at a high school, where he thought "real" learning takes place. But the more he worked with young adolescents, the more he liked working with young adolescents. Middle school began to feel like a home rather than a building.

Those early years were pretty rough. Unfortunately, funding in Fairbanks was drying up and the school he was in moved away from the middle school model and transformed back into a junior high after his first year: students shuffled through seven 45-minute disconnected class periods every day. It wasn't ideal, but McCormick figured that's the way it was done everywhere.

Then, a revelation: after relocating back to Vermont after several years away, McCormick moved back into a school committed to middle school. He met with his teammates every other day. What is more, he began working toward his Middle Level endorsement. Those classes, particularly the ones with Susie Giardin, taught him about the specific needs of young adolescent learners and what he could do in his classroom to meet them. Excited about what was happening in his classroom, McCormick brought Giardin to the rest of his team. This summer, they completed several days of professional development centered around meeting the needs of their adolescent learners. They have committed to a number of new initiatives, from creating a team identity to developing interdisciplinary units, that have them more excited about the beginning of school than ever before.