Final Project

 PechaKucha Presentation

As I thought about what change project would be most meaningful to my work with students in the classroom I reflected significantly on what it was like for my students and I to teach and learn during COVID restrictions in our Connecticut public school last year. What is most memorable now is how sad my students felt overall, every day and how much I did not like my job any longer. I have spent significant time thinking about everything that was taken from us and that this is exactly what I would need to bring back with intentionality. Last year, they learned math and I taught math and we connected as best we could, from six feet apart, half of our faces covered, emotionally tired of offering and receiving “simulated support” from the physical and emotional distance we shared space in together.

From this experience I learned that I believe students learn best and I teach them best when there is time afforded in class to create a community every single time we see each other. My students know we will work on math concepts together every day because I want them to be free to choose the life they want and I believe problem solving skills and the math concepts we learn together in the seventh grade are necessary to interact in our world as an educated person. By creating and making time every day to build our classroom community, they will also understand that I value them and our relating just as much as I do our math work together.

Brainstorming a change project would not be touching on the most significant changes in my work with young people next year if it did not include the fact that we are adopting block scheduling and becoming 1-to-1 with Chromebook devices at our school. These are two major shifts in learning that I am both excited and anxious about. My biggest concern is teaching 7th grade math for 90 minute blocks. I know I will need to cut my curriculum strategically, I know that I will be able to leverage technology to change teaching and learning like never before, I know that I will see them less often (each class used to run for 50 minutes, 4 days a week) so we will have a change in frequency and repetition which definitely affects math learning. Beyond all of these truths, what has been concerning me the most is how to structure a 90 minute block in a way that fosters a love of learning in my students and a love of teaching for myself.

From this place, my change project was born. I have created a live agenda template that I will post in the classwork section of Google Classroom for my students each class day. It will serve as the structure to hold the components that will foster everything that I believe students need to learn: organization, time for community building, connection to themselves and others, collaboration, exploration and opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. This action represents my major takeaway from Sir Ken Robinson, that I can, as a teacher, create a space in my class that reflects my values about who youth are and how education should go. As soon as I decided this to become my project, I felt a visceral, “yes” so I know this will lead me in the direction I need to go as an educator.

I was deeply impacted by our work with Wesch and watching baby George and how this child was so connected to his purpose in learning something new, how courageously he kept at it after repeated attempts and ultimately how he clearly believed that he could do it if he just kept working at it. By the time I meet my 7th grade students, these internal beliefs and learning skills we saw held by baby George have shifted out of alignment. I understand from our classwork together that a part of my work with students is making time for collaboration, exploration and practice because I believe learning happens when students are given the opportunity to celebrate that part of learning is making mistakes, adjusting, making more mistakes and learning from them along the way.

In our writing reflections during this class I had the opportunity to think and reflect about what moments I have felt like the teacher I want to be and also what I believe about how students learn. These moments have led me to myself, to sit quietly and relax all other expectations and just focus on a central question to gain clarity from within myself. This has been a gift afforded several times in this course and from my writing, I understand I want to include this time in each class for my students as well. I am finding so much value in my change project of a digital agenda because it allows me to lead with making time for what I value in learning which is positioning students as teachers and as learners in the classroom through community connection to start and self reflection and writing to close, and time for a variety of activities that include collaborative work and exploring math together.

Since my students will all have school issued laptop devices this year and only about 50% of them have had any technology or smartphones in the past, I am very excited to have the ability to develop this digital agenda for this fall of 2021. I do not have summer students that I can use this on now, but I imagine this will be used to hold all of the digital resources that my students will need for our class each day. Last year, I used Google Classroom and had one post per day to organize our work together, however, I had to attach links separate from the directions which led to some confusion. The template of this new digital agenda will allow me to include the timing, flow, links to all of the work, groups who are working together and differentiated materials by student or group. For example, the students who are in my tier III math group will receive different higher order thinking problems when they move to station C than my tier I math students on a given class day. This agenda will allow students to see and do what is appropriate for their math level and allow them to work in their individual zone of proximal development without others knowing they may be receiving different work from one another.

Considering Scott Noon’s stages of teacher training in technology, I believe my creation and usage plans of the dynamic agenda places me in the techno-constructivist stage because it is not simply the digital form of an agenda I had previously written on the board. I have grown since last year when I was a techno-traditionalist and using the Google Tools for Education in a way that would get my original materials out to the full distance learners in a digital format. I knew with my students receiving devices this year, it was important that I help them use this technology in a dynamic way in math class and I wanted to challenge myself to create a truly dynamic project that I could use to help my students and share with my colleagues.

A secondary motivator for this change project stems from what I have heard other educators in my school say about how they plan to “handle” the 90 minute block. I’ve heard, “they can just complete their homework in school now”, “I will just squeeze two of last year’s classes into one” and this concerns me deeply. I fear that our students will need to endure and survive 90 minute classes due to the lack of education about this new block schedule and how it will impact learning at our school.  In August, I will provide professional development to the faculty and included in my technology development, I will offer this digital agenda template to my colleagues as a way to organize their work with students and invite them to wonder why they teach and what they believe about how students learn. It is my hope that this digital structure can become a foundation for other educators to make it their own and to reflect what they want to make time for in support of their own subject areas, beliefs about how students learn and create an empowering education model that reflects the role that media and technology will play in their own 90 minute classrooms.