Author: mizzblue (Page 4 of 5)

“Educators value the involvement and support of parents, guardians, families and communities in school”

As a new career teacher and long time youth worker, standard four sticks out to me. Developing positive relationships with families is a skill that is rarely taught, but that can have innumerable positive impacts on our students. This is often especially true of families that educators and support workers have come to think of as difficult to connect with. 

When I began working with kids, first as a piano teacher then as a youth counselor, I often joked glibly that parents were the hardest part of the job. Then, as I worked with more youth who had fractured relationships with their families and trauma connected to their families, I began to think of their parents in almost adversarial ways – I lacked the compassion I was able to offer their kids despite the parents so often being a product of the same traumas that were impacting the young people with whom I was working.

Eventually, I started working at a youth support organization that had a small team committed to supporting families alongside their youth, including a parent peer support worker. I shared a communal working space with the remainder of the outreach team (with whom I worked), and the family and peer support teams. In this shared working space, as we collaborated on our caseloads and leaned on each other for resources I began to get glimpses into the lives of the families of my clients. With that, I began to understand that the vast majority of the time they were not my adversaries, but my teammates, and that connecting with them would strengthen the support systems around my youth. As I started improving my skills with regards to connecting with these families, I saw shifts in their own relationships with their kids, and the wellbeing and success of those kids.

Most recently, I worked as a Family Involvement Worker in a school (a far cry from the “parents are the worst part of the job” attitude I had a decade ago). Despite occasional pessimistic statements from fellow staff, who assumed many of the parents weren’t willing to show up to events and celebrations for their kids, I found the parents to be their children’s biggest supporters and advocates. As I go into a year of teaching at this same school, I am so excited to work collaboratively with the parents of my students.

Based on S. Katz’ learning exchange videos, develop your own Theory of Action statement of how you plan to approach teaching Science and Math in the form of an if-then statement. – This is the prompt from which the following was conceived:

If science is how we make sense of the world, then all students deserve access to it. If all students have access to science, then we are obligated to teach them to critically evaluate information. If all students are taught to critically evaluate information, then all teachers must have an understanding of the biases within their lens. If all teachers are aware of the biases within our lens, then all teachers are responsible for remediating those biases. If all teachers work to remediate their biases, then all teachers must be actively engaged in anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-ableist learning with regards to science and research. If all teachers are engaged in this bias confronting work, then they will create lessons that reflect anti-oppressive pedagogies. If we create lessons that reflect anti-oppressive pedagogies, then all students are afforded access to science. If all students have access to science, then they are given the opportunity to use their newly refined, clarified, and critically evaluated knowledge to make sense of the world around them.

What follows, is that the building blocks of understanding science at least as it is framed and developed in eurocentric societies, is mathematics – number sense and statistics. If students are to make sense of their world via statistics, measurements, and patterns, then we must ensure they understand the principles that underlie the conclusions being drawn. If we want students to understand mathematical conclusions, then we must teach them to understand graphs, formulas, and what they tell us. If we want students to understand what graphs and formulas tell us, then we must teach them when and how to use them. If students need to know when and how to use graphs, formulas, and statistics, then they need to have number sense and an understanding of how to add, subtract, multiply, divide, find percentages, find different types of averages, and calculate patterns whether they present themselves in lines or curves. If we want students to have all of these technical mathematical skills, then we must teach them the building blocks, the math facts, the information identification skills, and the why of their learning. If we want to ensure they understand the basics and the why, then we must make math relevant to them. If we make math relevant to them, then students will always understand how math can be used to describe their world. If students understand how math can be used to describe their world, and how science can be used to make sense of those descriptions, then students have the power to use that information to shape their world critically and lovingly.

During this term’s experiential practicum, I had the absolute joy of working with a grade 5-6 class at Kildala elementary school. These students were engaged in their learning, creative, energetic, and absolutely everything a new teacher could hope for. Designing lessons for this group was an absolute pleasure and I hope they learned half as much from me as I learned from them.

I wanted to take an opportunity to share some of the highlights quickly on my portfolio, along with a collage of some of the work they shared with me.

• The students participated in a cross curricular language arts and arts education unit focused on various cultural representations of the Sun, Moon, and Stars in local and international cultures. The students then created their own stories using a variety of formats including Tik Tok style videos, stop motion, and an original song.
• In math students learned portions of their fractions unit using games (like Fraction bingo which focused on equivalent fractions), and puzzles (a large group activity that used the fraction foundations the ovoid, a shape from Northwest Coast Indigenous formline). Other sections of this unit were taught explicitly using an I do, you do, we do approach to new content.
• Cross curricular lessons focused on water, health, the environment, and food sovereignty spanned outcomes and competencies in science, physical education, and social studies. Amongst these were lessons on repatriation of Indigenous artifacts, an opportunity to engage with authentic resources on traditional health outcomes impacted by water access, and an outdoor education trip to see an ancient spruce tree.
• In French, the students completed a novel study on the novel L’ours et la Femme Venus des Etoiles – the students created wonderful creative reflections on this novel and wrote their own stories that explored the structure of the “creation legend” in local and world cultures.

What most struck me about this practicum, was the continued curiosity, creativity, and excitement these students showed me when presented with opportunities to learn. As I’ve reflected in the days following, I’ve wondered how we can support all students in maintaining their love of learning and personal curiosity, in the way that these things have been protected for the students I got to work with over the last month. Most of all though, I am so grateful for this group and my coaching teacher – what a spark for the start of my career.

I just wanted to share on here my first iteration of what my dream classroom would look like. I recently heard the term “disruptive daydreaming” – a practice meant to disrupt the systems that confine us and allow us to imagine futures in our work that might otherwise seem untenable. In creating this small draft for a course this term, I could feel that disruption taking hold as I imagined a learning space that would allow for holistic and inclusive learning with foundations of quiet, patience, movement, and growth.

My e-portfolio has been an opportunity to consider what examples of my work represent the educator I aspire to be. As I was considering which artifacts to upload at the end of term 1 and beginning of term 2, the questions I asked myself had a lot to do with my values as an educator and what work best represented those values in a skillful and creative way. This in turn allowed me to reflect on what those values are, and I found it helpful to return to my pedagogical philosophy statement when considering this. Taken as a whole, this practice of considering my values, considering my work in response to those values, and returning to previous reflections on my educational philosophies, is at the core of my understanding of what it means to be a reflective practitioner. Put in different words, choosing what work to share allowed me to consider the ways in which my praxis as an educator is aligned (or could be better align) with the theoretical and ethical underpinnings of my beliefs about education.

The articles we were offered to reflect on our e-portfolios for this post offer a lot of options for how an e-portfolio might be used once a teacher has graduated. While some of these ideas (like utilising the e-portfolio for ongoing communication with parents) don’t particularly resonate with me, I do find myself increasingly curious about how I might continue using my e-portfolio. Certainly as I curate it to present my best self as an educator, I see how it could be valuable as an offering in the hiring process. I also think it might be a nice way to maintain and look back on my favourite activities, lesson plans, and strategies over the span of my education and career. One use however that made me really curious, was the idea of using my own e-portfolio as an exemplar for students, who might create an e-portfolio as a form of assessment for a course or several courses. I see the potential for students to not only create work for the e-portfolio but also reflect on and choose the work that best represents who they are as a learner and as a person. I particularly enjoy teaching late elementary and early middle school grades, so this feels like a fantastic opportunity as students do start to really build and strengthen their self-identity in those years. 

I find myself still slowly navigating and investigating my curiosities around the e-portfolio. In many ways, it has felt like putting together a blog or myspace page felt in the early years of social media – a chance to create an aspirational version of the self. So I am hopeful that as I build that best educator in e-portfolio form, I am able to use that as a guidepost for my honest, everyday, in the classroom approach. And I hope that I continue to do so after graduation, and potentially find ways to offer e-portfolio to students as a means of creating aspirational and value driven identity in their own learning journeys.

In an education system that has all but done away with holding students back, what is the purpose of assessment? In a classroom that no longer uses letter grades, what is the role of assessment? As we move towards a system that we hope sees the whole student, how do we assess our students in their wholeness without reducing them to one test or assignment or essay?

Particularly within the context of a contemporary northern classroom, the assessment methods I grew up with feel largely like a waste of valuable instructional time. High stakes tests, essays, and complicated assignments can be alienating to students, and ultimately I want my students to feel engaged in their learning. Any assessment that I would feel good bringing into my classroom, would have to be in a context that facilitates inquiry and engagement.

There are a few ways I think this is doable, and they all hinge largely on one criteria: teachers must be informed and competent professionals with the tools to assess informal and creative means of demonstrating competence. Then, within this belief, I think it’s important to break down assessment styles based on the content and skills being assessed.

It is important for teachers to assess fundamental skills like literacy and arithmetic which do not always feel fun or practical to students but are essential to creating an equitable learning environment. It is also important for teachers to assess broader learning that includes research skills, special interests, creativity, and extensions of learning.

Assessment of fundamental skills can build on learning and be made to feel engaging by creating informal, play based, and holistic assessment tools wherein a teacher is able to assess the skillset as it is used in a game, an activity, an art piece, or even in simple classroom strategies like personal whiteboards. A competent and engaged teacher can use these types of assessment to gage skill levels and get an understanding of whether kids are on track, pushing beyond the expectation, or still developing a skill, and meet the child and the group where they’re at as they continue working on these skills.

In assessing broader learning skills, teachers can make use of land based learning, inquiry based learning, and in particular authentic assessment. When we as teachers allow students to take the lead on their learning within a semi-structured prompt, there are seemingly endless ways students can express not just their competencies, but also their strengths and passions. While I think this is incredibly valuable, I think it is also important that we as teachers help our students to understand what skills and knowledge we are hoping to see them demonstrate, and help them in their process of finding ways to demonstrate those competencies to the best of their ability.

Initially when sitting down to write this post, I felt some variation of “anti-assessment,” but in considering the nuances of my feelings about assessment I have realized that there is always a role for assessment in helping to gauge the progress of learning. What I am against, is assessment as a means of assigning value to students. Instead, I am excited to continue to explore assessment as a way of furthering learning, increasing engagement, and identifying areas of strength to build from with students.