IT IS WHAT IT IS


 
Year 13 teacher here. It’s safe to say that I am officially part of the seasoned crew. With the years of experience comes one of two things: higher or lower expectations. That’s because older teachers tend to be stuck in their ways or highly experienced with a wealth of teaching strategies for every type of learner. I’m a mix of the two. Because of my experience, I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to be a model teacher. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I try to pretend that I’m not and I have everything under control.

With that said, no matter how many years of experience and how comfortable you are in your tenure, you have to be observed. No one is exempt. Well, that time for me was about two weeks ago. In the past, even as recently as last year, I would always plan a spectacular lesson to present. Even if it meant veering from my lesson plans. It would include activities that showed that the students had learned a lot about a topic and would be very hands on and creative to get the students excited. I have even splurged on snacks as an incentive for an observation lesson. On occasion I would give the students the heads up that I was going to be observed, but I found that it didn’t make much of a difference. I would stay up the night before until well past midnight trying to perfect transitions, directions, worksheets, and questioning. Everything had to be perfect. The result of this was consistently good, but never great. Because I would reinvent the wheel instead of being organic, my lessons lack authenticity. But, this year was different.

This year I am tired. This year I’ve exhausted every bit of strength that I have and I didn’t feel like planning for hours for one observation. So what did I do? I presented the lesson that I’d always intended to teach. My supervisor asked me when I wanted her to come, and I told her to come the next day to get it over with. I’m tired of the dog and pony show. I am who I am. It is what it is. It’s that balance of being experienced and stuck in my ways. So she came. I taught. Students learned. There was evidence of learning. She left.

For the following week I obsessively checked my portfolio to see if my observation and ratings had been posted only to find nothing. It’s funny how the very observation that I didn’t stress over was now causing me a bit of stress in anticipation for the feedback. I even had dreams that I’d checked my ratings and they’d added up to a pretty impressive score only to discover that the scoring range had shifted and my rating was now mediocre. Why did I care now? Because my reputation is attached to that evaluation and I have expectations to meet because I am seasoned.

I finally had my post-observation conference last week and it was great! I received a healthy balance of both the highest and second highest ratings in all areas. Receiving such great feedback from my supervisor was the motivation and validation that I needed to continue to do what I do every day. I teach. No special performances. No fancy props. Just a regular day in my class is enough to be effective. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HERE WE GO AGAIN

Image
It seems that every year there are changes in pedagogy. However, in my opinion, these new concepts are really old ones that are just repackaged and given fancy new names. With the constant influx of theories and research that dictate how we are to teach comes the teacher training workshops usually run by well-paid consultants who have rehearsed their presentation dozens of times to schools across the country, but never actually implementing them and of course not with the at-risk students that I teach. And let’s say that they have worked with students in a school district similar to mine. They most likely worked with a group of hand selected students or at a charter school. Needless to say, this is the case for me yet again this summer. My Title 1 school was awarded a grant to make improvements and one of those improvements is working with a program to improve overall academic performance and to give all  students the option to attend college. That’s perfectly fine with me, but
Read more

WHY I DON’T FEEL LIKE TEACHING TODAY

Image
Early in my teaching career, I worked at a high school that made people gasp when I told them that I worked there. It was no big deal to me. I did not encounter many disciplinary issues at all. However, the majority of the students that I taught were not motivated to learn. Each one had their own story and I understood, but on this one occasion I was a bit fed up. I had been teaching them the structure of a persuasive essay for a few days and wanted them to write with a bit more command. I was teaching the counterargument. What I thought would be one lesson took several. With that said, on one particular night I was confused and frustrated about why my students were struggling so much to address the counterargument in their essay. At that point a light bulb went off. I decided to write a model for them to analyze (I found that the exemplars that I wrote for them helped a bit more than the exemplars found on the web because I wrote about topics that they could relate to, so that'
Read more

YES, I'M JUDGING

Image
Here I go again sharing my two cents on something that came across my feed on Facebook. The title of the post “My Title 1 Kids Have $300 Shoes. And It’s Nobody Else’s Business” immediately caught my attention, because 1) I teach at a Title 1 high school and 2) I do judge the students and their parents when I see them with expensive products. The author of this article wrote with a strong tone of sympathy and compassion for her, presumably, immigrant student and his choice to purchase a pair of $300 soccer cleats. She doted on the fact that his family struggled financially and that he actually paid for the shoes himself by working with his father doing landscaping. She complimented the student’s motivation to work hard to get what he wanted and warned teachers against making assumptions and judgements about what our students and their families chose to purchase with their money. Now this is all fine and good, but it is not the narrative for most of the students that I t
Read more