Standard Four Classroom Practice Overview
I have successfully employed teacher presentations, collaborative activities, questioning and discussion, and developed student skills during my student teaching and have met this standard for beginning teachers. I used pacing well to show students that my classroom expectations are both high and purposeful. I have used group work to coach for collaboration as well as to differentiate my instruction to reach diverse learners. I have helped students develop basic skills, especially in regard to accessing a text, summarizing key information, vocabulary, and writing. I have also used classroom debate throughout my student teaching to create enduring student understanding and as a performance assessment.
I use multiple modes of presentation in each lesson including, for example, teacher lecture, visual aids, modeling, group work, discussion, and debate. Additionally, I try to ensure that each student has the opportunity to read, write, and speak in every lesson. I have sought to provide the necessary scaffolding, breaking complex tasks and understandings into discrete and manageable steps and helping students to connect new knowledge to prior knowledge and to their existing mental schema. Overall, I am confident that I am proficient in all aspects of Standard Four.
Reflection One: Teaching the Writing Process
Midway through my student teaching I assigned a three-five page essay on the forces putting pressure on the institution of slavery before the Civil War. We had covered slave resistance, Black abolitionists, and the work of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society, and the essay assignment allowed students the opportunity to synthesize information and write a persuasive argument. The artifact below includes examples from each step in the process: the assignment, rubric, concept web, graphic organizer, first drafts, teacher comments, peer-edit sheet, and final drafts.
Please click on the link below to view a series of documents illustrating each step of the writing process as well as four examples of student work, my first artifact demonstrating proficiency in meeting Standard Four:
Reflection Two: Director Observations
One of the most valuable aspects of student teaching was having experienced teachers observe and give feedback to me. My mentor teachers’ daily advise was invariably insightful and extremely useful in adapting and modifying my instruction to better reach all of my students. The regular observations by the clinical faculty in the Education Department at Brown were also most helpful to me in my development as a beginning teacher. Below is an example of observation notes given to me by the director of my program after she visited one of my classes.
Please click on the link below to view the observation notes from the director of Social Studies/History Education, my second artifact demonstrating proficiency in meeting Standard Four:
Director Observation Notes. 2.12.08.pdf
Reflection Three: Class Argument
Having students evaluate multiple and competing perspectives from the past was one of the main themes of my student teaching. I used “class arguments” as a way to help students access a text and become engaged with certain material. When teaching Andrew Jackson, for example, I prepared a handout that contained ten bullet points about Andrew Jackson from their textbook and ten bullet points about Andrew Jackson from Howard Zinn’s A Peoples’ History of the United States. I broke the class in two large groups and had everyone stand in two opposing lines facing the center of the room. We then took turns shouting bullet points back and forth, each time responding by yelling “Oh yeah!?” in response. This was an effective way for students to access a text. They did particularly well in reading both texts after our “class argument” and in their free write exit tickets. Below is my lesson plan and four examples of student free writes about Andrew Jackson.
Please click the links below to view my lesson plan and four examples of student free writes on Andrew Jackson, my third artifact demonstrating proficiency in meeting Standard Four:
Benjamin Weber: Mid-Term Self Assessment on Striving to Meet the Brown University MAT Program’s Practice-Based Standards for Beginning Teachers
Standard Four: Classroom Practice
(A) Teacher Presentations. I believe that I am either approaching or meeting this aspect of the standard. Although I plan presentations with the needs of diverse learners in mind, use different modes of presentation, and build in comprehension checks, I sometimes find myself giving in to the propensity toward lecturing or speaking at a level that is too advanced for some of my students. This is something I struggled with in the summer, and still remember my mentor teacher and director’s reminders to “put things into kid language.” I have worked to get out of the teacher-talk/student-listen lecture paradigm so prominent in higher education, and have included visual aids, modeling, and graphic organizers to help scaffold my direct teacher presentations. Giving students a purpose other than taking down the information has also been very effective. One lesson, for example, I gave a presentation on the Haitian Revolution with notes prepared on chart paper but informed them that they would be working in groups to make notes for their peers on chart paper and then giving a presentation on various slave uprisings in the United States. Knowing that I was modeling something that they were then going to do helped them to stay engaged with the teacher talk. Frequent questioning targeting higher and lower order understandings (as assigned by Bloom’s taxonomy, for example) has also been extremely helpful in improving my teacher presentations.
(B) Collaborative Activities. I feel that I am meeting this aspect of the standard, and have become much better at structuring activities and giving clear instructions. I also happen to particularly enjoy making collaborative activities for my students and usually write my own handouts and research packets. I have successfully employed a range of collaborative classroom activities on a regular basis, including pair-share, jigsaw, group projects and presentations, and team debates. I have provided for individual accountability within group work in multiple ways, including assigning roles and making written evidence of active participation (like notes) part of student’s participation grade. I have developed a clear sense of which objectives are best accomplished using different collaborative activities. A think-pair-share followed by a whip activity works well to stimulate initial thinking, recall of homework reading, and to activate prior knowledge, for example. Jigsaw activities, to give another example, work well in teaching content in which there is a general theme and multiple cases (I did this with four different examples of social reform movements and with four different slave uprisings). In terms of pre-teaching the necessary skills, I would like to make better use of a collaborative work skills rubric to clarify expectations and make goals for effective participation in working with others more tangible.
(C) Questioning and Discussion. This is one area in which I have made considerable progress but still have many goals for improvement. Before teaching I mistakenly thought that I would naturally generate good questions. I have learned the value of scripting questions in my lesson plan as well as clearly defining the types of questions I am asking (whether recall, synthesis, application, analysis, evaluation, and so forth along Bloom’s taxonomy). I have also learned to use questions much more frequently throughout my lessons and to distribute them more equitably. I do this by both asking for volunteers and randomly calling on students. Furthermore, I now appreciate the value of wait time. I like to keep a quick and purposeful pace but I have observed that students need time to think and have worked to forecast questions and let students know that I will be coming to them. Differentiating and individualizing my questioning has became much easier by this point in the semester as I have gotten to know the students much better. I have become aware of my tendency to rephrase student responses and am trying to ask more follow-up questions so they do not get into the habit of relying on the teacher to reframe their contributions. Class discussions have been very productive and useful but it is always a struggle to get every student to participate or to get them speaking to each other rather than passing all comments through the teacher. I have attempted to do this more by conducting a Socratic Seminar, but it was a challenge the first time.
(D) Development of Student Skills. I am rapidly approaching meeting this aspect of the standard. Following out “Literacy across the Curriculum” course this past summer, I have thought of myself as a literacy teacher from the start. I implemented strategies to help students develop skills of organization, note-taking, writing, accessing text, constructing arguments, and public speaking from the beginning, but have recently focused more attention of skill acquisition. My lessons ensure that students read, write, and speak each day and I have provided them with notebooks and folders in order to scaffold note-taking and organization. The weekly-debates allow me to individualize my instruction, helping four students at a time to strengthen their abilities in constructing arguments and public speaking. I have closely monitored students’ acquisition of skills by writing detailed comments each day in response to their classwork, particularly in the beginning. This extremely time-consuming endeavor as paid off, the evidence has been visible, and the progress measurable.
Taking my mentor teacher’s suggestion that I focus more on student writing skills, I began a week-long essay writing project. Students are expected to choose a claim and write a persuasive essay of three to five pages synthesizing content we have studied for the past two weeks. The essay is both challenging and exciting as I have asked students to decide which were the most critical forces putting pressure on the institution of slavery leading up to the Civil War (slave uprisings, everyday forms of slave resistance, the work of abolitionists both Black and White, and so forth). I have broken down this complex task into manageable and organized steps and made instructions and expectations clear. From the start, students were provided with a rubric explaining the criteria for excellence, an instruction sheet that explained the steps of the writing process and was aligned with the terminology of the rubric, a concept web to scaffold brainstorming, and a persuasive essay graphic organizer to structure the outlining process. I have pre-taught necessary skills in discrete lessons, had students pair-share to help each other brainstorm and review their notes, and modeled each stage for them. Although many seemed initially intimidated by the formal essay writing process, they are all on board and I am very much looking forward to the final products. As something that I want them to feel proud of, I plan to create time both to peer-edit and to read final drafts aloud. I have also provided motivational pep-talks about the value of writing, explaining not only that it is a measure by which intelligence is judged within the dominant culture of power (and they are way to brilliant to be written off, so to speak, by a professor or employer because they still use contractions and other sloppy colloquialisms) but also that it is not just about them. I still write everything my mother turns in for her job as she never finished high school, I told them, and asked that they think of themselves as prospective leaders in their families and communities as there is always a need for strong writers. Not only do subject teachers not typically think of themselves as writing instructors, but even many English teachers would prefer to teach poetry or literature. The results of a straw-pole of the number of students in one of my classes who had ever had a class on writing: two.
Overall, I feel that I am either approaching or meeting Standard Four, depending upon which aspect of the standard we are talking about.
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