Pecha Kucha link and narrative
Every year I am the teacher determined to be more organized than last year. I buy new brightly colored bins. I meticulously make labels with names and pictures on them. I have individual storage spaces for each child as well as clearly labeled class materials. I feel like once I get my room organized I can focus on the students.
I’m always looking for ways to improve how my classwork is set up. When we have PD days within our district and get to visit our colleagues' classrooms, I spend a lot of time just looking around at how they organize their classrooms and store their student’s work.
I have always felt that I needed to keep most work samples so that I had evidence for RTI meetings. I have actually started carrying a huge plastic tub to my RTI meetings because it’s big enough to hold everything I will ever need to show a child’s progress or be examples of my concerns. It’s all about the data, right?. The team wants evidence to back up my observations.
I spend tons of time at the beginning of the year teaching my children where things go and how to take care of them. Teaching these rituals and routines are just as important as getting to know each other. This is all well intentioned and I feel quite proud of myself when I can quickly put my hands on a child’s work sample to show a parent.
And then Coronavirus hit and we were sent home to take an early vacation. I thought we’d be back in a week. What did I know? When we were told to go in during that week off to gather teaching materials I grabbed books, my math binders, my reading and writing unit books… anything I could think of. But what I didn’t grab was my student’s work. All of that stayed completely untouched, tucked neatly in their hanging file folders. In my closet. At school.
We began distance learning and we focused on connecting with our students. It was refreshing to hear from our new superintendent that connecting with our students and getting them to engage was our most important work. I felt so relieved to have a leader who shared my values.
Simultaneously, I was trying to teach my 5 and 6 year olds how to use our new learning platform, Seesaw. Since I have such young children, I was teaching my students and their parents how to use it. But, if I am to be honest, the parents and children were teaching me in some cases. It wasn’t long before I realized that my students were showing me neat little tricks they found out about using Zoom and Seesaw. At the time, I didn’t realize there was a name for my students. According to Prensky, these digital natives were showing me a thing or two. And even their parents were closer to being digital natives than I’d ever be.
After about a week of slowly getting into distance learning, I started receiving a lot of emails from parents and a lot of parents were hopping onto our class zoom meetings. They were asking some really important questions. I realized that I had been focused on helping the children adjust to the new learning but I had forgotten about the other piece of the puzzle or other corner of the triangle that makes learning successful.
Parents desperately wanted to know exactly what to do. How did I say things in class? What language did I use? What do their children need to know by the end of the year? Are they where they need to be? Is the work they are doing for me at home what you would expect? How do I correct them? This was good information for me. I had not been putting into action my core belief that teachers and parents need to work together in order to help their child succeed. I had parents who were trying their best but they were missing out on some vital information. And I was the one holding it from them.
All year long, I thought I had been communicating with my families. I used Class Dojo to show families the fun things that were going on in class each day, had a shared Google folder filled with what I thought was important parent information, and had used Smore.com for online newsletters. I was happily in the Techno-traditionalist stage according to Noon. I had even been using planbook.com for the past few years so that I could always have access to my planbook wherever I was. I thought I was satisfied with this aspect of teaching.
And then (insert Law & Order sound bite)... Coronavirus. What I really needed to share with the parents was what I had been holding onto as sacred treasure. They didn’t know the extent of the amazing work their child did each day in our classroom. I would send home the math papers they did during one of their math centers and they would take home a reading book each night. But hidden away, for safekeeping, was all of the writing and their science journals. These were the pieces of evidence that really showed where the children were in their learning and development. And I was holding them as if I were the only one who needed to see them.
What good was all the work doing for me in my classroom now that we were now home? How was holding onto that information until the end of the year beneficial to my students or their families? This year I realized more than ever that getting my own children’s work literally dumped on me at the end of the year did absolutely nothing for me or my child. I honestly have to say that while I did read through the work, it was a skim and it wasn’t in a timely manner. It stayed in a pile on my dining room table longer than I’d like to admit. And more importantly, I wasn’t able to help my child because I didn’t have anything to compare her work to. I didn’t have class exemplars or examples of her own work done in school. While it is great to see a child’s progress from the beginning of the year to the end, it is not as powerful as seeing it when I need it in order to help my child.
I had forgotten my WHY. Simon Sinek believes the most effective businesses, and I will stretch that to say teachers, are deeply rooted in their beliefs. Why do I teach? What do I really believe about children and how they learn? I believe that children learn best when parents and teachers have consistent, open, and honest communication. I learn from the parents about who their child is, what their history is. I inform the parents about their child in the classroom and about our learning goals. And all the while, the children are teaching both the parents and me! Like Wesch, I believe making connections with my students and families that will allow for learning to take place.
So now I have an opportunity to be more organized next year. I have an opportunity to include my student’s families in a more authentic and timely manner. We are being advised to prepare for the likelihood that we will at some point be teaching and learning from home next year. So starting in September, I will introduce Seesaw to my students. I plan to use Seesaw not only as a platform for delivering lessons. I will use it as an online portfolio that parents can access from the beginning of the year.
I will teach the children how to take pictures of their writing and science journals and put it in their digital portfolio. I will teach them how to record themselves reading and talking with their partners. Each child will have folders for each subject- writing, science, reading, phonics, etc. At any time, parents can log onto the Seesaw Family app and look through their child’s work. It is my hope that this will also help increase the kind of conversations families are having at home. When parents ask, “How was school today?” kids often simply reply, “Good” or “Fine”. When parents can see the work their child has done they can rephrase their questions to more open ended statements. Maybe “Tell me about your investigation with wood and water today.” It’s almost like how I am learning from Mitra to ask more open ended questions that provide learning opportunities for my students.
It is my hope that when parents see the level of work their child does at school, they will be better equipped to help them once we start learning at home again this year. Parents will be empowered with the knowledge they need to help their child continue to be and feel successful at home.
And if I am to really push myself to be more techno constructivist, I could even explore recording myself teaching small groups lessons or during individual student conferences. This way the parents will hear the language that I use and be able to support my work in school while at home. I imagine they will be impressed with what they see and hear their child doing throughout the day.
And by doing this I will be following the lead of Wesch and taking action on my core belief as a teacher. Children are more successful when parents and teachers work together to share information with the common goal of educating the child.
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