Concluding Post: An Open Letter to my Students

Dear Students of the past, present, and future,

            I want to start off by saying, “I am so happy that you have been, are going to be, or you are right now a part of my life.” I believe that each person that we meet and spend time with, as we have been or are going to do, aids to shape one another.  I hope to help you to become the person you are going to be and I know that you will help me to develop into the teacher that I am supposed to be.

            From the very beginning of my teaching career, which is now going on 4 years, I have always had a very clear and concise philosophy statement for how my classroom is going to run.  I have referred back to this philosophy at the beginning and end of each year.  I do this to see what I need to do to start the school year off right and to reflect at the end of the year to see if I followed through with my plans.  My philosophy always starts with the atmosphere of our classroom.

 I start the first few weeks before school begins creating a warm and inviting atmosphere.  I love colors, displays of learning, and both yours and my presence all over the room.  There is not an inch of wall space that I do not cover.  I make sure that your places are all set up. The seat you will sit at, the place for your backpack, and your mailbox for papers or materials.   I want you to walk in to the room and find those places in the room that belong to you because for the next 10 months this is your home and I want you to feel safe and comfortable in your home because that is the best way for you to learn.

Once you feel safe and comfortable, you will be able to open up and allow for me and your classmates to get to know you.  I think it is very important for you and me to create a personal relationship with one another.  You are an individual and you should be treated like one.  You have different thoughts and feelings from your other classmates.  You have different interests and ways of learning from your other classmates and those should be acknowledged and celebrated in our classroom.  This is important to me because I think having a relationship opens you up for learning and taking educational risks, such as answering a question even though you’re not sure if the answer is right, reading out load to the class, completing a math problem to show how you got your answer, or sharing you writing to be edited by the class.  This is also important to me because growing up I remember always being a number in elementary school.  I was number 7 because of my last name.  I always felt that my teachers new me more as my number than they did as a person and it made me feel uncomfortable and unsupported in my learning.  I never want any of you to feel like a number or just another one in the crowd.

While supporting you as an individual I also want you to realize that you are part of a classroom community, that you are one important part in a big whole.  It is important for you to learn how to work together and how to support all of your classmates because they are on your team.  We must learn to respect and care for one another.  As I mentioned earlier our classroom is your home, but you need to remember that it is also their home and my home too.  Everyone is to feel comfortable in our space and part of that comes from the way you treat one another.  My father has always taught me respect.  He put an emphasis on it my whole life.  Respect for my parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, and any other person that may cross my path.  I expect that same thing from my students.  You respect me, your classmates, other teachers in the building, and other students.  I am a strong believer in; if you treat others with respect they will do the same for you.  I promise to respect each and every one of you as long as you do the same for me.

My goal as a teacher is to support my students into becoming successful adults.  You may see me at the beginning of your educational career, but my end goal is the same as every other teacher you will meet.  It is my job to prepare you for the world outside school.  Even though I teach you the basics, these are the things that you have to take with you for the rest of your life.  I promise, that I will not just teach you how to take and pass a test.  I will help you to use your new knowledge in your everyday lives.  It is part of my philosophy to teach the standards in a way that you will retain the knowledge for a very long time.  In my perfect world I would not have to give you tests at all, unfortunately that is not the case.  I have worked with teachers and in schools that are so concerned with the tests that this is all they teach.  They believe that by having students circle the title of the story or count the paragraphs and split them into three parts their students will know how to read.  They believe that having students be able to find the best answer out of a list of questions teaches them to solve problems in math.  I cannot teach like that!  I want you all to walk away from my classroom being able to say that you honestly learned.  I want someone to ask you years later what you learned in my class and you are able to tell them.

When choosing my own personal curriculum I think about each individual student.  I am a visual learner.  I have to see it in order to retain it.  This was always difficult for me when learning math and science.  When presented with abstract material verbally I could not see it.   It didn’t make sense to me until I was shown what it was supposed to look like.  I try to think about how at times learning was harder for me because I needed things to be presented differently than the way the teacher taught.  It is for this reason that I try to teach using different forms of presentation.  I may teach with visual, verbal, and kinesthetic forms of the same lesson.   I also try to utilize my students as teachers as well.  I have learned that many times they can say things in a way that I can’t.  They may be able to reach a student in a way that I was having trouble.  This theory is especially useful when teaching math.  I believe that there are many strategies that can be used to find the answer to math problems.  I always teach the strategies that work for me.  I always encourage my students to find their own strategy or to ask a friend or family member to see if there is a different way to do it.  To me the most important thing is that you are successful in my classroom and outside of it.

The last thing I want to talk to you about is how I use school chosen curriculum in our classroom.  I have mixed feelings on school chosen curriculum.  I believe that if a curriculum is going to be used, then everyone in the school should use it.  I worked at a school where each grade level was able to pick their own writing curriculum.  Each curriculum used different vocabulary and processes for writing.  This left for some very confused students as they moved through the school.  I also worked at school where everyone used the same writing curriculum.  The differences were amazing.  It was an easy transition for students to go from grade level to grade level because they already knew what was expected. 

With a school wide curriculum in place I feel that it should be used as a resource and not a lesson plan.  The state or national standards guide what I teach in my classroom.  I use curriculum to help plan lessons that reach those standards.  In my experience, following a curriculum to its entirety can leave gaps in the students learning.  I work hard to make sure that those gaps do not exist in my students. 

I hope this letter helps you to understand more about my teaching, my thoughts, feelings, and philosophy.  I am over joyed to be a part of your learning experience and I hope that you get everything out of my class that I plan for you to.

Cycle Five: What Does A Good School Look Like?

I believe that a good school can be determined by its atmosphere, its staff, and the community of families that belong to it.  There are so many different aspects that should be looked at when judging a school.

First I think that the atmosphere of a school, like a classroom, needs to feel warm and inviting.  I have walked into schools that are dark and bare and I feel that I am in jail instead of in a place to learn.  A school should make its students, staff, and families feel safe.  It should make them feel welcomed.  I love working in a school that has student work on the walls and invitations to upcoming events displayed.  Its how I feel about a home.  I want to have a home that looks lived in.  I want people to walk in to my house and feel comfortable to be themselves, to sit anywhere, to get their own cup of water.  I want my school to look learned in.  I want the students to see their accomplishments and to show off all they have done.  I believe that the feeling a school gives can set the tone for behavior and a students ability to learn.  It is the same for each individual classroom.

I think that the staff should be looked at next.  A good school is full of staff members from the principal and teachers to the lunchroom staff and janitors, all there to help the students learn.  Each staff member should be know that no matter what their job is they are there for the kids.  I honestly believe that to be a good educator you have to know that this job means that you give more.  Every member of the staff should be trying to make personal relationships with the kids.  My school has been giving us a professional development all year on Love and Logic.  This is a behavioral management program that focuses on how you talk to and treat students.  One lesson we learned was about creating personal relationships with your students encourages them to respect and listen to us. This may be as simple as noticing that they have blue shoes, or that they got a hair cut.  I think that these relationships, though important in the classroom, should not stop there.  I have worked with a principal that didn't know many of the kids and I have worked with ones that knew every kid.  I have seen what a difference that can make.  Feeling important can change so many things for a student, as can feeling like another one in the masses.

I believe that having teachers on the same page with curriculum while still allowing them to bring out their own individuality helps to create a good school.  I think it is important for students to see some commonalities in their learning as they move from classroom to classroom in a school.  This may consist of using the same vocabulary, the same programs, and the same tools for teaching.  At the same time, like every student learns differently, every teacher teaches differently.  I have heard of schools that demand their teachers to do everything the same.  They are given scripts to follow and they can not stray from the chosen curriculum.  I don't think that I would be teaching at my best at a school like that.  We all have our own personal takes on how to teach.  Our styles are different.  Our delivery is different.  These differences help to make us better teachers.  It should be encouraged instead of stifled.

Last I think that a good school is present in its community.  It offers extra activities and programs to the students and their families.  A school should allow other members of the community to take part in what happens in the school.  I was wowed by how many community members were a part of Dave Eggers tutoring program.  It just goes to show that given the right opportunities people are willing to put in their own time and efforts.

There are so many components that go into making a school good.  It bothers me that most schools are rated solely on test scores, when really that is just one aspect of a school. Being able to do well on a test can only get these kids so far.  If we look at the bigger picture.  Schools at the elementary level all the was to high school are helping to prepare kids for the real world.  We are shaping them into the people they are going to be.

http://www.loveandlogic.com/
This website explains about the love and logic theory.  It gives tips for parents and teachers.  I have found a lot of what they teach to be helpful and started implementing it into my own classroom.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-mcguire/what-makes-a-good-school_b_779035.html
This is an article written by Jim McGuire.  He describes his ideas of what makes a good school.  I agree with a lot of what he says.

Cycle Four: How Should Curriculum Be Created?

 
 This cycle we are looking at how curriculum should be created.  After reading the article about the Texas Board of Education and their changes to social studies curriculum, I realized I have stronger feelings about this question than I originally thought.

It had never crossed my mind to think about who creates the state or national standards that we teach.  I have always viewed it as an expert.  This thought now kind of baffles me.  Especially because I used to teach in Texas and they were changing the reading and the math standards while I worked there.  I was irate over some of the math standards that were changed.  The rumor was that they were bumping all standards down two grade levels, meaning that a standard that was taught in fifth grade last year will now be taught in third grade.  As a third grade teacher who watched my students struggle with the third grade standards and the time line the district was giving us to teach them in I could not fathom my students being successful with standards that were once expected of fifth graders.  Even with all of that I still thought it had to be a credible source choosing the fate of my students.  Boy was I wrong!  I now see that anyone can be on the Board of Education and anyone can insert their own personal agendas into the lives of students across the country.  This is where my feelings about who creates the curriculum changed.

I now strongly believe that the people in charge of creating curriculum should be focusing on what is developmentally appropriate, what is important to create successful members of a community, and they must cover truth and facts.  It is important to me that the people deciding what I teach have knowledge and a background in education.  They should be impartial to politics, religion, and race when deciding what will be taught.  They should not be a dentist or a lawyer who have not step foot in a K-12 classroom since their own days of attending school.  I for one am offended, but not surprised, that the Texas Board of Education allows people to make decisions about education based on their religious and political views.  The idea that someone could tell me that I must teach my students to look and judge important figures in history based on their own personal opinion or that I should have discussions boosting one religion while putting down another.  As someone who is not Christian, that is not something that I could do.  I believe that the view of curriculum that started in 1954 of multiculturalism and inclusion are the way the people in charge should be focusing.  I believe that church and state should be separate and I believe that if you talk about religion or politics in school all sides should be taught.  We are supposed to be helping our students find their own voice, not creating them to think like us.  This has to start higher up than the teacher. 

In the creation of curriculum there should be a change.  This change should come from the who and not the how.  I do not understand after so many years how the decisions about education is still being left in the hands of people who have never stepped foot in a classroom as an educator or who have never taken a course on teaching and curriculum.  Our society has this view that anyone can decide I am going to teach or work in education and they will know exactly what to do.  This happens with allowing organizations like Teach for America or programs, like the one in Texas, which put someone with a degree in anything in the classroom and give them a few classes with tips and pointers on teaching and allow them to teach.  This happens with allowing a dentist to create teaching standards that are set for the whole state and will be looked at by the whole country.  This is demeaning to our profession and to those of us who work hard to make sure that these kids are getting everything they need.  These actions tell me that my education and knowledge is not needed and that someone who has no experience can walk into my classroom and can do my job just as well as I do.  I actually just watched an episode of 1600 Penn on NBC.  The son in the show was trying to figure out what to do with his life and the stepmom suggests teaching.  I believe there was a line along the lines of, “It’s easy to be a teacher.  All you need is a degree.” (Note that his was not in education.)  Followed by, “No one wants to be a teacher.”  People honestly believe that this is true and this is why the education system in our country has not gotten better.

Curriculum should be decided by educators; teachers and principals, people who are around the students, who are in the classrooms, and who have taken the appropriate education themselves that allow them to be knowledgeable on the topic.  It should be created with the consideration that every student is different and it should be decided by a group of people that come in with an unbiased opinion.  This is at least what I think.

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/oct93/vol51/num02/Who-Creates-Curriculum%C2%A2-New-Roles-for-Teachers.aspx

This is an article about a school district that is allowing their teachers to play an active role in choosing and creating curriculum.  It looks at what their role would be and processes they can use.

http://www.education.uiowa.edu/archives/jrel/fall01/Johnson_0101.htm

This article looks at the demands that administration has to go through when working with curriculum.  It focuses on the societies role in their decisions.

Cycle Three - Should Curriculum Address Controversial Issues

                Should curriculum address controversial issues?  To me, this is a very important topic.  I have very strong feelings about curriculum going farther than teaching just reading, writing, science, math, and social studies.  This is not all that we teach, so our guidelines should include more as well. 

I spend my days working with 17 first graders.  At least an hour, spread out through the day, is spent teaching my students acceptance, caring, and kindness.  All the qualities I expect them to exhibit as human beings.  Some days I have more conversations about how our words effect someone else’s feelings or about how it is ok be to different or about what is hurtful laughter than I do about addition, matter, and digraphs.  I do this because when those students are in my classroom and in my care I try to make sure they will feel safe to be themselves.   I have watched a countless number of students poke fun, tease, and even torment each other.  The sad news is that it is starting at younger ages.  I remember elementary school feeling like we were all on level ground.  It was middle school that I started to notice a change.  7^th grade is the first time I can remember being picked on.  Now I have seen first grades laugh when a student gives a wrong answer, third graders playing a game where they are contaminated if a student they don’t like touches them, or fourth graders making a list of girls they think are lesbians and writing “stay away from” on the paper.  It is at these young ages that their ideas on how to treat each other begin.  It is at these young ages that we need to start teaching them that acceptance and tolerance of those that are the same and different is the way to treat each and every person.

 I know that I am not the only teacher that spends time on this subject matter and I think it would be helpful to all of us if there was some type of curriculum to work from.  I am constantly trying to come up with new ways to get my students to understand exactly what can happen if they are not careful with the way they treat one another.  I agree with some of the skeptics that some of the subject matters are too much or above the heads of the younger students.  Designing a curriculum that gives teachers kid friendly and developmentally appropriate ways to talk about these issues would help in the understanding process.  We should be able to talk to them not just on a surface level.  If we can talk about the differences in color and religion in elementary schools, we should be able to talk about sexuality too.  I took a class over the summer that discussed multicultural reading, having books available for students to be introduced to characters that are similar and different to them.  We talked in great length about how this was important for all students, so that those that are different feel welcomed and those that aren't can see that differences are ok.  Since that class I have been working on building up multicultural books.  In my classroom, culturally, my students are very much the same.  It is important for them to broaden their horizons, to see that when they walk out of that building into the world that not everyone will look and act just like them.  This is most important for those students that don’t hear these things at home.  I was raised were this was a conversation my parents had with us.  I remember walking around an antique fair with my father when I was in high school.  We had just walked past a gay couple.  He turned to me and said, “Katy, you accept everyone no matter what they are like.”  This was not the first time I had heard this from him.  It was from my parents that I learned to be an accepting and tolerant person.  I strongly believe that all people should be treated equally.  If our students are not hearing this at home then I feel it is my job to teach it to them at school.  My parents always told me, “You don’t have to like everyone, but you do have to treat them as if you do.”  I think this is the best advice I have ever gotten.  It is this that I want to pass along to my students.

http://www.procon.org/sourcefiles/they_belong_in_the_classroom_4-06.pdf

This article is about the need for a controversial issues curriculum.  It talks about a High School teacher in Colorado who was teaching these issues in his geography class.  There was of course an uprising about this.  It proposes a seven step model called Issues Analysis.  This model is supposed to embrace these issues in a proper way.  

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1679439 

This is an article about the teacher mentioned in the article above.  Jay Bennish was suspended for comparing Bush to Hitler in a lecture during his class.  His students walked out in protest of this decision.  It looks at a teacher's freedom of speech.

Cycle Two - What should schools teach? How should they be held accountable?

This week we are looking at what schools should teach and how they should be held accountable.   As a teacher these questions often come up but I never feel that I myself can answer these questions.  This is because a teacher’s opinion on this subject usually seems to not matter.  It is the government, the district, or school administration that tells us what to teach in our classrooms and how we will be held accountable.   I teach from the standards set for my grade level.  I am supposed to teach using the curriculum picked out by my principal or district administration and I am judged as a good teacher or not based on how my students do on a test picked out by the state, the district, or in my case now, the principal.  I have always felt that there is a problem with this.  The people who are telling me what to teach and how to teach are not in my classroom.   They are not working with my students.  They are not a witness to the challenges or to the accomplishments that take place each day.  It is for this reason that I believe that these questions, “what should schools teach and how should they be held accountable”, should have a teachers input when being answered.

The readings this week looked at many different viewpoints on what should be taught in schools.  We were able to learn about a middle school that teaches through video games or a high school that focuses on teaching students about their possible vocation.  These ideas are interesting.  I am sure they get kids excited about learning and school, but I also believe they work for specific kids only.  As a person who has never really gotten into video games, nor have I ever been very good at them, I’m not sure I would be as excited about learning through that process.  Whereas the students that attend that school thrive from the experiences they are having, I am not sure that I myself would succeed.   The vocational high schools are great, assuming that the students know what their passion and future career choice is going to be.  I have a few friends who are in their late 20s still trying to figure that out.  The point I am trying to make is that each student is different.  It is a wonderful idea to offer a different choice to our regular school setting, but I don’t think that these choices can be a complete replacement.  There are students who thrive in the schools that they go to now.  Those students may not want a change. 

Another question that arose in my mind while learning about these schools was what about Elementary schools?  How do we get the younger students excited about learning?  The Studio School and Quest to Learn are not offered to the Elementary age.  I have worked in three different school districts and three different grade levels.  I have had students, even in Kindergarten, that were already unmotivated and had no drive to learn.  How are those students reached?  To me the answer is something that my school is working towards right now, differentiated instruction using the multiple intelligences.  The focus is to plan lessons that try to reach each student’s interest and learning style.  It allows the teacher to engage their students in reading, writing, math, science, and social studies in a way that will directly relate to them.  It takes a lot of work and time.  It forces the teacher to really get to know their students and what makes them work.  This idea to teaching gives way to things such as blogging, creating games, making up a cheer or a play.  It allows the students to make choices and have a say in their own learning.  It is also something that can be used for all age levels.  I can tell that my students are more engaged in my phonics lesson during small group when they are playing a game on my ipad.  They have also been more encouraged to do their spelling homework because they can choose how to practice their words each night.  At the end of the day the most important thing is to have students who learn.  Any idea that creates that is a good one to me.

http://www.differentiatedinstruction.net/

This website is about differentiated instruction.  It tells you what the program is and how to use it.  It also gives resources and events, as well as introduces you to one of the people who wrote a book about this topic.  You can find workshops to go to on this website as well as set up to have them come talk at your school.

http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el_198809_brandt3.pdf

This article looks at the use of philosophy in a school curriculum.  It is an interview with Matthew Lipman, who believes that teaching philosophy is “the best answer to the call for teaching critical thinking.”

Cycle 1 - What is curriculum? What is its purpose?

Cycle one asks us the question, “What is curriculum and what is its purpose?”  This is a hard question to answer.  Through the readings and my own experiences I have come to realize that there are many different answers.  Every teacher, principal, school board, state official, researcher have their own opinion on what curriculum is and what it should do. 

The last three years I worked in Pasadena, Texas.  It was a great experience being able to leave my comfort zone of Michigan and see how things are done in another place.  I can honestly say that my ideas of curriculum that I gained throughout undergrad and my internship were very different than how it was viewed by most in the school district I worked for.  Their common definition for curriculum was test preparation.  There were many discussions on how will this look on the test or how can you narrow down the multiple choice questions.  I remember a fellow teacher talking to me about the all-important “strategies”.  These consisted of things such as, circling the title and paragraph numbers in the story (because that helps students to read and comprehend).  I am happy to say that after my first year teaching things began to change.  Their ideas about curriculum started to stem out from just preparing their students for the state standardized test.  Unfortunately this change was brought on by the change of the state standardized test, but all the same it started to change.  There were some teachers who then viewed curriculum as the text book that was offered to them.  I like and agree with the statement made by William Schubert in Perspectives on Four Curriculum Traditions, “….,they all agreed that curriculum is a great deal more than the textbook.” (Schubert, 1996, Pg. 1)  I believe, as do many others, that there should be more to a curriculum then what I saw by some in Texas.

Curriculum to me is supposed to guide teaching.  It is supposed to tell us what the students need to learn and give ideas on how best to get them there.  It is not a book that you follow from cover to cover.  To me, curriculum is a plethora of useful resources that help me to create engaging lessons that support every one of my students understanding the state standards.  I have now worked at three different schools (including my internship year).  At each school they had different ideas on curriculum.  My internship year I taught Kindergarten.  The teacher had worked for that school as a Kindergarten teacher for 30 or so years.  Her idea of curriculum was a tub for each month full of worksheets.  I remember it was rare for her to pull out the GLCES or a resource.  On planning days she pulled out the bin and her lesson plan book from the year before.  I learned that year to create my own curriculum.  I used the GLCES as a starting point.  I used the internet, other teachers, and mailbox to plan my lessons.  I have learned a lot since that year, but overall my lesson planning is the same.  Even now when I work at a school that offers me a curriculum for each subject, I use those as a guide and continue to look other places for ideas that will work best for my students.  That is how I view curriculum: a guide to helping me reach each of my students.  It is as many of the authors from our readings pointed out, not one student is going to learn the same way.  They are not all going to respond to a lesson the same and they are all going to take something different away.  That is why I have to do my part to find as many different ways as I can to teach the concepts that they need to know.

A big part of curriculum is the state standards.  These set up what each student will learn.  In the Sharon Otterman article we were asked to think about Donovan as well as other students and try to decide what they should learn.  This country is pushing and pushing for more academics.  I can’t tell you how many times I have had the discussion with a student’s parent or my own peers about how Kindergarten today is what First Grade was when we were all in school (which I like to tell myself was not that long ago).  I think back again to my time in Texas.  I taught third grade for two years.  At the end of my second year the state was working on changing the math standards.  The rumor was that each grade level was going to have standards that were originally set for two grade levels above them.  This means that my third graders were now going to be expected to learn and master standards that were being taught to fifth graders the year before.  This change was coming despite the fact that my third graders were struggling with the concepts that they were already being expected to master.  I asked my principal and colleagues at what point does someone say, “This is no longer developmentally appropriate.”  When do we stop pushing the 5 year olds or the 8 year olds or the 12 year olds and remember that they are still kids?  I also struggled with the time constraints in which our students are expected to learn all of these standards.  When will someone take into account that I not only need to teach my students reading, writing, math, science, and social studies, but I also need to teach them how to talk to a friend, how to apologize when you accidentally bump into someone as you pass by, or that it is not ok to pee all over the bathroom floor?  I think that the standards and the curriculum should include and allow me time for all of the things that I need to teach my students to make sure that they will grow up to be successful citizens. 

Resources

1.       http://www.teachersmind.com/Curriculum.html

This website has a similar message as our other readings in that it looks at curriculum as more than just how I see it, as a guide to planning lessons.  It describes what curriculum is.  It points out four curricula that are used in schools:  the official curriculum, the taught curriculum, the learned curriculum, and the tested curriculum.  These four curricula break apart what really happens to curriculum in a school.  It details explicit and implicit curriculum as well as the null curriculum, or what gets left out and why.

2.       http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-curric.htm

This website looks at what curriculum is as well as how and why it should be used.  It focuses on using curriculum to build your lessons.  It looks at curriculum in four ways: as a syllabus, a product, a process, and a praxis.

It's Nice to Meet you!

My name is Katelyn Gold, although I go by Katy.  I live and grew up in Saline, MI.  I just moved back to Michigan this summer.  I lived and taught in Houston, TX for the last three years.  I loved living in Texas, although I was not a fan of the heat, but I am very happy to be back in Michigan where I can enjoy 4 seasons and being close to my family.

I graduated in 2008 from Michigan State with a bachelors in Child Development.  I did my internship in a Kindergarten classroom in Bath, MI.  I moved to Texas from there.  I worked at Morales Elementary School in Pasadena for three years.  My first year I taught Kindergarten.  I then moved up in age groups and spent the next two years teaching third grade.  I now teach first grade at  New Beginnings Academy in Ypsilanti, MI.  I have loved being able to teach many different grade levels, but if I had to chose my favorite it would be third grade.  It was actually the move to third grade that helped me to decide what to pursue my masters degree in.  I loved teaching reading comprehension and learned a lot about curriculum those two years.  It was those experiences that guided me towards my goal of gaining a degree as a literacy specialist.    I am very excited to begin this course!