All Good things Come to an End

It is finally here, the end of my first graduate class online. It is bitter sweet like most endings of great adventures. I will miss the fun and creative projects that Steve had us working on, I will miss seeing the creativity of my fellow classmates, and I will miss the weekly chats with my classmates. Yes, there is a new adventure on the horizon, but like finishing a good book I just want to sit back and reflect on how much I enjoyed it. As I packed up my portfolio to send, my husband commented on the large pile of work. Funny, it did not seem like work. I look through the pile and smile at how much I learned and truly understand how to do. As was reiterated many times throughout our class, project-based learning is the way to own the information and to be able to use it later. When will our state and federal governments stop the insanity of testing so that we can get back to being great teachers and the students can actually learn something useful?
I learned so much through trial and error in this class. Yes, it was frustrating at times, but like anything you work hard at; the reward was great in the end. Students need to have that feeling of success. They need to see the product of their hard work in a physical form. Self-esteem and self worth is elevated when a visible result can be seen. Project-based teaching encompasses all types of learning styles and intelligence levels so that an individual's gifts and talents can be used and further developed. I have believed in this technique in teaching from the start of my career. I owned and operated a successful preschool for nineteen years that used a unit study approach(old term for project based) with great results over the years. Children learned and loved learning because it was fun. I home-schooled my two children through the elementary years so that education could be fun. Testing was not the focus in either of those teaching experiences. As a teacher, you know when your students understand the information. When students can show you what they learned and use what they learned, there is the proof that the teaching was successful.
A new adventure will be starting soon for me with another graduate class. I am looking forward to learning something new. I can only hope and pray that a new adventure begins in the public school system soon. So many great teachers are losing heart and drying up. So many students are not learning how to love learning. Students are losing that sense of adventure that can come with new information. There is nothing bitter sweet about that, just bitter.

Pulling It All Together

Our Earth Science knowledge was put to the test this week as each group focused on a different river than the Nile, either the Colorado or Amazon, and had to answer certain questions. The questions covered a variety of topics, such as where the river flows, watershed boundaries, discharge, precipitation and changes in seasonal patterns surrounding the river. Each group member was responsible for responding to a different question. My question pertained to discharge in the Colorado River and its tributaries. Prior to taking this course, I would not have known where to begin to answer this question. My studies of the Nile River have provided me with a solid foundation of how river systems work as a whole. In the upcoming week our assignment is to create a story about how the interacting components of the river we are investigating work together. I am looking forward to seeing how everything comes together.

On the curriculum front, we have been putting the final touches on our TfU (teach for understanding) plans and have started implementing them within our classrooms. More specifically, we have been focusing on performances of understanding, which are designed to help students develop and demonstrate their understanding. Within our generative topic, we were challenged to devise a variety of performances that show student understanding in an observable way. It is stressed in Tina Blythe’s Teach for Understanding book that they are learning activities and not final events. Each assessment is placed into one of the following categories; introductory, guided or culminating. Introductory performances are at the beginning of a unit and invite students to begin “messing about” with the issue/topic. Guided inquiry assessments are in the middle of a unit and focus students on particular problems related to the generative topic and understanding goals. Culminating performances are at the end of a unit and require students to pull together their understandings developed in previous performances.

We, as teachers, then ask ourselves; how do we know what our students are learning? On-going assessment is the answer! They are crucial and can be done in a variety of ways. The key word is on-going. They may be formal, informal, teacher lead or student lead. Students may even critique/reflect on their own work. Teachers informally assess their students frequently, but are not always consciously aware they are even doing it. For example, floating around the room and checking in with the students as they participate in a lab is an informal way to assess how the students are progressing. We sometimes get caught up in grades and forget that there are other means of assessing how our students are doing.