I have some time to reflect. I have some time off. In the last week I went into overdrive, and really made my absolute best effort to go through the planning process we’ve learned PD this year.
I’ve been doing lesson plans all year, of course. Objectives, check. Started doing task analysis, done. And I chunked out a few lessons. But this last week I chunked out every single lesson. It was fantastic. I always feel like when I get home I just don’t have the energy to plan everything out for the next day. That’s the fool’s choice there. Once I planned it all out, I found the day went so much easier that I had more energy when I got home. Plus, there was one day where I had to cover another teacher’s class and my aide had to functionally sub. With the lesson chunked out and scripted, it was a breeze for him to take over, and he basically taught the lessons the way I would.
As for Whole Brain Teaching techniques: so easy to do when a lesson is chunked. It’s functionally the WBT lesson plan anyways, so it works out perfectly. Great to see also that WBT techniques basically follow best practices in lesson planning.
Planning
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The 1 reason I can NOT flip my classroom.
I got a ping back! My first ping back! Thanks Learnboost! It was from this blog post. I’m especially flattered that I was the link of choice to a teacher with good classroom structure.
Ironically, I’m a huge fan of flipping in the right cases. I don’t think that a flipped classroom necessarily has to lead to a lack of structure. Rather, I think it’s probably impossible without it, and it’s even more important that you have a structured environment with clear cut expectations, since you will be spending more time with individuals and small groups than the whole class. It’s no different than small group work now, except it’s for the whole period not just the last half.
For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, a flipped classroom is one where the students get the lecture at home, through means of video over the internet usually, and then do the “homework” at school. It makes a lot of sense, because the application of the idea is where the students do the most critical thinking, and need the most guidance, but have the least opportunity to get it from the teacher, since we rarely have time for independent practice in school, so we do guided practice and then send them home with stuff to do.
Here’s my biggest problem with it: I have 7 students in my class. 3 have internet at home. Only 1 is allowed to use it on a regular basis. I can’t flip my class even when I want to because the infrastructure isn’t in place, and there isn’t a darn thing I can do about it. My biggest problem with education today is not the wealth of new ideas coming out of academia and top-performing schools, it’s that those ideas are often impossible to implement given the situation on the ground.
I was just watching the “tour of the south” episode of Top Gear, where the British hosts drive worn out cars from Florida to New Orleans. It was filmed a year after Katrina. When they get there, they are in absolute, slack-jawed shock at the state of the city. Jeremy says something like, “We’d heard about the devastation, but we figured the richest country in the world would, well, fix it. We didn’t know how the rest of the people in the US could sleep at night knowing what was going on.” Well, Jeremy, they don’t. They don’t know the extent of it.
The best point made in the linked post is the 4th one. My students come to school hungry, angry, and with no resources or positive influences. To me, that means they need access to alternative ways of doing things even more. But it ain’t gonna happen soon.
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The Power of Choice
I had a hard time getting my students to buy into Whole Brain Teaching this year. They rebelled. They have Emotional Disabilities. That’s what they do.
So for the last few months we’ve been doing lecture/notes/worksheets; the old-fashioned way.
Complaints, complaints, complaints.
I said, “Well, we can take notes or do WBT. Which would you prefer?”
WBT.
No complaints since.
Amazing how a little agency makes a big difference. I forget this on a regular basis. I need to remember.
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Some Thoughts on Positive Behavior Systems
My school has a school-wide behavior management plan. It is not positive.
The way it works is that every student carries around a sheet that has a row for each period and a column for each day of the week. Teachers either initial the period to indicate the student had no problems, or put a code for one of the numerous issues a teacher might have in class. There are codes for chewing gum, having your uniform untucked, missing an assignment, not turning in homework, missing a signature on another part of your sheet, and behavior (which covers everything else, including cussing out your teacher, for example). All of these result in the same consequence: a 45 minute detention after school. So if you forget to get your mom to sign your sheet, or cuss at your teacher, you get the same consequence.
Also, if you miss a detention, you still have to serve that one, plus you get an additional detention.
By the 7th week of school, we had detentions with 20% of the 8th grade in them, and some students had so many detentions racked up they could have been perfect for the rest of the year, and still had to serve detention every day for the rest of the year.
Yet my colleagues say we have a Positive Behavior System. How? Well, if you go for 2 straight weeks without receiving any bad codes, you get a Cougar Card. The benefits of this are that you only need to get your sheet signed twice per day, and you get to have free dress every third Friday, if someone else in your grade level doesn’t get in a fight and lose it for the whole grade level. Also, we sometimes have neat events, like a movie day, at the end of the quarter. Sometimes.
What is the end result of this? Students don’t care enough about the Cougar Card, and can’t fight the unending onslaught of bad codes.
There’s a lot of research out there that shows people are innately draw to the path of least resistance. It’s why it’s so hard to get people to eat right and exercise when it’s so much easier to watch TV and eat Domino’s. It’s not that teenagers are lazy, it’s that they are people.
Not only that, but recent research has shown that teenagers are not bad at assessing the amount of risk in a situation, it’s that they drastically overvalue the positive effect of a situation. Students will misbehave if they value the possible positive result for themselves of the misbehavior, no matter what the chance of success, and no matter how large the risk is, especially if there is no awesome thing drawing them the other way.
Put more simply, if you make it easy to be a bad kid, and hard to be a good kid, most kids will be bad.
I’m trying an experiment right now. Rather than demanding 2 straight weeks of perfect behavior from my students to get their Cougar Card, or even 2 weeks worth of good behavior, as I was doing with my previous point system, I am offering this: get 90% of your points in a day, you get your Cougar Card. You get to keep it for as long as you keep getting 90% of your points. If you have a day where you get less than 90% , you lose it…until the next day you get 90% or more of your points. Then you get it right back again.
I think this still represents what the Cougar Card is supposed to represent: a great student. However, it brings it into much easier grasping range. There are some students at my school who will never, ever have a Cougar Card. They will never know what it feels like to be successful. And my belief is that until a person knows what that feels like, they won’t desire it. You have to know success to want it. This plan brings that closer to being a reality.
I’ll report back after a few weeks and let you know how it goes.
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Changing format
I’m trying an experiment this quarter. I’ve been feeling overwhelmed trying to manage behaviors recently, and I kind of dug into myself and looked at why, and realized it’s because I’m feeling so frazzled by the curriculum. Having to switch gears between five different subjects every day was just wearing me out mentally.
This quarter we will be doing one subject per day, one day per week. So Monday is Reading, Tuesday is Math, Wednesday is Science, etc.
I believe there will be multiple benefits of this system for both me and the students. The first for me is simply less mental stress every day. I only need to prep myself on one subject per day, rather than 5, and hold all of that information in my head. It’s going to be easier for me to remember 5 periods worth of information about poetry, than about poetry, Newton’s Laws, the Pythagorean Theorem, and World War II. Second, it will make planning more efficient. I can spend all my time each night planning one curriculum area and coming up with different activities based on that theme than jumping around between 80 different resource books for all the different areas.
For the students, I think it will be less mentally stressful as well. There will be less transitioning for them. We will be doing different kinds of activities, but they will also be more focused. I think it will also be easier for the students to stay organized in this way. They will have less homework because they’ll only need homework for one subject per day, and that will in turn make things easier for me since they rarely turn in homework anyways, so I don’t have to track as many pieces of information.
I tried it out on Thursday and Friday doing Reading and Math. It went pretty well. Math particularly went well. First period we took notes on surface area and volume of all different kinds of polygons. 3rd period we did a project where they were handed real objects and had to measure them and, using the formulas we took notes on, come up with their surface area and volume. 5th period we started a comprehensive project using the Investigations curriculum on proportional relationships, and 6th period we did Standardized Test Question practice.
I was much more calm and collected on both days, I was more organized, and I believe that led to a better response from the students, even when they weren’t excited about what we were doing. My 7th period, which is always crazy because it’s when they get to buy free-time with their points, was quiet for the first time this entire year on Friday.
Looking forward to see how it works out for the rest of the quarter.
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Getting ready to head back
I found some great resources over the weekend.
First, www.explorelearning.com they have some great “gizmos” that are flash-based science experiments. It’s like having a whole science lab without actually having to get the lab!
Second, www.lessonplanet.com is fantastic. It has links to TONS of lesson plans all over the web that are reviewed by other teachers. For teachers like me, who aren’t full content experts in every subject we’re asked to teach, it’s a boon.
Finally, PBS has a wonderful collection of videos and lesson plans on all sorts of stuff, but I’m focused right now on their history materials.
I found all these while trying to put together my curriculum maps for the next month…I’m pretty worn out. Unwrapping all the standards for four subject areas is a long process.
In Language Arts I think I’m going to teach Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies. The major standard for 3rd quarter is comparing themes across different works. These are the only two books I can find that are middle-grade reading level, content-appropriate, and have similar themes we can compare easily. Plus, we have lots of trouble with violence at the school, and having a chance to look at the effects of peer pressure, poor ways to deal with society and disagreements. I’m looking forward to it.
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Implementing WBT Without a Plan
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So, I’m reflecting on this last semester of teaching, and how I’ve been implementing WBT.
I work in a middle school, teaching self-contained class. So I teach 6th and 8th grade science, social studies, math, language arts, and electives (right now I’m doing technology). I’m getting rid of the elective, somehow, during third quarter, because I don’t have a prep period when I do it. Right there, in the WBT manual, it says, you gotta plan to do this. My problem is, I don’t have enough time to plan all of this! I don’t even know half of the social studies and science content I’m teaching, so I spend every night reading the textbooks myself to learn what I’m supposed to be teaching the next day, I’m doing mapping for five middle-school subjects, and that takes up my whole weekend. Basically, I spend hours and hours every week planning, and I rarely actually get to the stage where I’m mapping out a lesson, because by the time I even have the day-to-day objectives done, I’m beat. And since I’m not a content expert in almost all the contents I teach, I spend the rest of the time learning it myself, not planning how to teach it. What this has led to is that I pretty much only implement WBT stuff in Math, where I’m the most comfortable with the content (do have my cert for GenEd in this area), but since I have the same students all day, it’s weird for me to just do it for one hour, so I can never build momentum, and with these kids (emotionally disabled), momentum is everything. I’m sitting here planning for when we come back from break, and I feel like after every break I’m ready to go again and get all of this going full-time, but I can never get it to stick because I get bogged down just staying afloat. I’ve been using WBT for two years, and it’s been amazing for me and for my students, but I feel like the demands of this position are keeping me from excelling. Looking into the future, I think I can work with ED kids and one subject area, but I just can’t keep up teaching four subjects I don’t know to kids who don’t care. Maybe if it was Elementary, but I can’t keep the Constitution and Newton’s Laws and Functions and Characterization and touch-typing in my head at once.
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