Friday, March 21, 2014

Pacing

I visited the Waldorf School this week as one of my grade level observations this semester. UVEI recommends visiting three schools/districts and observing classrooms at or around your current grade level placement. Last fall I visited three schools and observed in 4th, 5th, and 6th. This spring I'm visiting different schools and lower grades.

Of the many differences I noticed between the Waldorf School and the public schools I’ve been involved with, the pace was prominent. During my morning at the Waldorf School not once did I hear a teacher say to hurry up, which is something I feel we say constantly in kindergarten at my school. Our days feel so fast and I often feel like we are rushing the students from one activity to the next. Even snack is rushed so they can get their snow clothes on for recess. Lunch is rushed. The only thing not rushed is quiet time when we spend a half hour telling the kids to lay down and be quiet, but even that doesn’t feel calm.

Today we took the kids on a field trip and it was the epitome of rushed. We cleaned up early from free play in the morning, rushed through number corner and morning message, then hurried them through bathrooms and getting ready to go outside. We scurried to the bus and to our seats for the show. Then we sat and waited for half an hour before the show started, all the while telling the kids to sit down, sit still, be quiet. The show was nice, but very slow paced and some kids did better than others. When the lights came back on we sat for another 15 minutes telling the kids to be still and be quiet while we waited for our bus to be called. Once it was called we rushed down the stairs and out the door, only to find out it was the wrong bus, so we stood in the cold for another ten minutes waiting for our bus. Of course we were late getting back to school and therefore late for their already-rescheduled late lunch time. We zipped back up to the classroom, coats and boots off, lunch boxes in hand, and hurried down to the cafeteria for lunch. They had about ten minutes to eat before we had to rush them off again, already late to their special. One girl, who often gets stubborn and shuts down, was starting to protest the rushing and I ended up sitting with her in the cafeteria for an extra five minutes while she eagerly and actively ate her entire lunch. I made the executive decision that she needed a few minutes to breath and eat a healthy lunch more than she needed those five minutes of art class. I know I made the right decision too, because she kept it together for the rest of the day, which I doubt would have happened if I’d taken her lunch away and rushed her to class.

This was not a typical day, of course, and they aren’t usually that rushed, but they do move fast and we do spend a lot of time hurrying them from one place or activity to the next. I find the pace exhausting sometimes. At the Waldorf School, though, they moved slowly through the transitions. The teachers spoke in song (there was a lot of singing!) and the students were allowed time to complete their tasks. It was very nice and very calm.

That said, if you removed all academics from the public school schedule there’d be a lot less rushing as well. There must be a balance in there somewhere.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Solo week and play-dough

This week is my first solo week in kindergarten.  Yesterday was awesome and I was really looking forward to today.  I was up late last night making play-dough for a fun project around the Monsters Love Colors book.  I thought the kids would love it.  Unfortunately today did not go as well.  I think they were going easy on me yesterday and today they decided to test every single limit.  Every. Single. One!  Sigh.  So my play-dough is now sitting on the counter at school, next to the book and a big bag of googly eyes.  Maybe we'll get to it tomorrow.  Or maybe we'll have  snow day tomorrow.  You just never know with kindergarten in March.

In all fairness, the students did test every limit but I, being over tired from staying up late to make play-dough, did not respond as well as I should have.  There's always a lesson to learn.  I'm off to bed now so tomorrow WILL be a better day!

Sunday, March 02, 2014

Expert versus Novice

When I started my fall placement I thought my mentor teacher was a genius.  He had so much information in his head and was so quickly able to pull facts relating to the content, the teaching pedagogy, the class, and the individual students.  He saw trends in student behavior and scores without even looking in his grade book.  One day he taught a lesson, modified it slightly for the next class, then skipped a whole portion and modified it drastically for the third class.  We were teaching in a departmentalized fifth grade, which gave me the opportunity to observe or teach the same lesson three times in a row and learn from each one.  I asked him why he had modified the lesson so much for the third class and he said, "They were just off today.  I could tell from the moment they walked into the room."  I, on the other hand, could not tell at all.  By the end of the class period I could definitely see it, but not at the beginning.  I was also unable to keep all the information in my head and resorted to many, many notes.  I sometimes wondered if I had brainpower to be a teacher and keep track of so much information, a problem I had never had in my previous careers. 

When I started my second placement I was again impressed with how much information the teacher seemed to have in her head, but I also noticed that I felt a little more confident and able to hold some of the same information.  Like maybe, given time, I too could manage it all.

Recently I started reading How People Learn, by the National Research Council, and it's all starting to make sense.  One of the chapters talks about experts versus novices and the different ways they attain, process, and retain knowledge.  They say that experts are able to see meaningful patterns in information and are able to organize knowledge into "big ideas" for more efficient storage.  Novices, on the other hand, don't have the background knowledge yet to see meaningful patterns, so novices are simply trying to retain all information with no meaningful way to store it.  Chris Jernstedt, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, agreed, saying "the amateur is taking in way too much information and needs help learning how to discriminate what is important."  (UVEI seminar, 10/29/2013)

In addition to knowing what information to store and how, experts also have more efficient retrieval of knowledge because it has been "conditionalized," meaning it includes not only the knowledge but also the contexts in which that knowledge would be useful.  Expert teachers know not only what information to store, but also why and how that information will be useful in the future. 

The book then takes it a step further to discuss adaptive expertise and the idea of meta-cognition, which the authors define as "the ability to monitor one's current level of understanding and decide when it is not adequate."   [How People Learn, p47]  Maybe that's the step that elevates one from good to great, the ability to monitor your own understanding and press further when you feel it's not enough. 

While I still believe my two mentor teachers are geniuses,  I now understand better the skills they have have developed over time as they moved from novice to expert teachers.  It took many years and lots of practice learning what information is important, what patterns to look for, how to group information into "big ideas" and how to effectively store and retrieve that information.  

"The ability to recognize the limits of one's current knowledge, then take steps to remedy the situation, is extremely important for learners of all ages."  [How People Learn, p47]