Field Trip!

The first day of the EMWP summer institute felt right. My brain was exhausted and my heart inspired. Today we will be writing all day around the immediate area of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. I have my teacher-writer bag packed with essentials: mechanical pencils, pens, paper, sticky notes, writer's notebook, iPad, digital camera, Clif Bars, and coffee money. I'm also bringing along Carl Anderson, Peter Johnston, and Jeff Anderson--not the actual people, but wouldn't that be amazing? I'm bringing, How's it Going?, Choice Words, and Mechanically Inclined. Partly because they aren't terribly heavy and partly because as I was building my demonstration lesson, I noticed the heavy influence of these teacher-writers on my own thinking and teaching. During this day of writing, I plan to spend time reading, reflecting, and writing to find the connections between their work and my work. I feel goofy like a 3rd grader all geeked-up for a school field trip.

Demonstration Lesson Worries

This Thursday marks the first day of the Eastern Michigan Writing Project Summer Institute 2013. Since I present my demonstration lesson on June 27th, I've been spending many hours. building and revising my lesson. Even though I have presented in front of teachers countless times, this feels different. Most of my presenting has been with elementary teachers. Looking through the participant list, the institute teachers and facilitators are primarily middle school, high school, and college. There are only three other people, other than me that teach in elementary. And of those three, only two focus on lower elementary grades.  I'm not sure if any of the participants are special educators either. Being a speech therapist, I am a complete oddball. I am finding it hard to put myself in the shoes of my audience. The lesson that I am drawing my demonstration from was taught to K-2 children with speech and language impairments. I have no guess as to how my audience will respond. Will they be able to relate to my students or what it takes to support kids with writing at this age?

Going with Weebly

Audience and purpose. Audience and purpose. Audience and purpose. As I repeat those words in my head, I continue to wrestle with my demonstration lesson for EMWP. And I volunteered to present during the first week of class! Deadline, audience and purpose--and form, oh, geez, form. My EMWP group is not primarily elementary teachers (audience). These professionals come from KG through college (more audience). I need a way for this diverse group to see and hear my students--to hear what I hear when I teach. I am concerned that middle school, high school, and college level teachers may have difficulty visualizing how very young writers, writers with speech and language difficulties, navigate the writing process (audience and purpose). I also want to create a demonstration lesson presentation that is meaningful and useful for me (more purpose). I decided to go digital and create a Weebly site to house all of my information, references, audio clips, and photographs of student artifacts (form). I considered creating a PowerPoint and also played with Movie Maker and may include these pieces on the Weebly site as I continue my learning throughout this experience.

Screen shot of my Weebly site. Still in process but has to be ready soon!

Putting the Pieces Together

School was over last Friday. I am proud that I survived--barely. As I wrapped up my year with a flourish of IEP's and Medicaid billing, I also worked at creating and implementing a lesson that I could use as the required demonstration lesson for the Eastern Michigan Writing Project summer institute. With three weeks left in the school year, panic set in. What was I thinking? I was no longer a coach and I wasn't working in classrooms during writing workshop. I talked to a colleague who was more than willing to allow me to visit her class to teach some lessons, but I would have to cancel or reschedule my speech students. I might have been able to justify it if I had speech students in her classroom, but I didn't. For me to cancel students with IEP's to work with other children would be inappropriate and unprofessional. Rescheduling would have been a nightmare. Also, I knew I wanted to use bits and pieces of a previous lesson using "hands" as a topic for writing but my thinking about it was all over the place.  I had to find another way. I decided to teach the lessons to several speech and language impaired students on my caseload.  I'm not sure why I didn't think of it sooner.  The goals of the lesson matched nicely with many of my students' IEP objectives. One of the primary reasons I wanted to be a literacy coach was to assist children with language learning challenges to be successful in their classrooms. I wanted to study the oral language-reading-writing connection in the classroom rather than a therapy room. Now that I am back in speech, I have this opportunity to use my experiences with reading and writing workshops and my passion for literacy and apply that learning to how I provided speech and language therapy. It makes my brain both wired and tired trying to put the pieces together.

It's In My Blood

"I should be a teacher."

(silence)

"Oh, okay. How come?"

"Today in chemistry, I helped some kids understand some stuff. I explained how I think about the problems then showed them step-by-step. They took their quiz and Ace'd it. I mean, I know it would be harder with a bunch of kids but it felt good to help them. I mean, I really helped them do better on their quiz."

"It does feel good to make a difference, doesn't it? Yunno . . . if you want to help other people, there are lots of ways to do that, honey. You could be an engineer and help other people too."

"Yeah, but if I was a teacher, then I could coach too and help kids in and out of class."

"Yes, you could but you could be an engineer and be a coach."

"You sound like you don't want me to be a teacher. I know you work a lot Mom, but you always said that whatever I wanted to do when I grew up, I should find a way to help other people, right? Besides, teaching is in my blood."

He smirked at me like he had won an argument then opened the pantry looking for food. I watched my 16-year-old son locate an open bag of tortilla chips and retreat to the computer room. I didn't know if I should take his comments about becoming a teacher seriously or not. The week before, we had visited a college with a respected engineering program. As the professor described the various engineering majors, he also mentioned that they have a new teacher education program focused on STEM. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something flash over his face. I dismissed it at the time. Now mixed feelings of pride and dread swirled in my stomach. I hated feeling this way about my own profession. I would never discourage my son from pursuing his passion, if teaching became his passion, but . . . things are so different now.

Beat the Problem

I spent my spring break this year traveling to four different college campuses in three different states. We visited schools with mechanical engineering programs that were within driving distance of our home in southeast Michigan. As part of every visit, we got to peer inside classrooms. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see actual students learning from actual professors.  As we tromped through the buildings, I was struck by how many classrooms were intentionally designed to foster group collaboration. One institution had classrooms with microphones suspended above the group tables so that questions and problems could be monitored by the instructor and shared with the rest of the class. A flipped model of instruction was used whereby homework included 20 minute lectures and classwork was reserved for discussion and problem-solving. I wish I could have seen it all in action. What I kept hearing over and over was that in engineering, it was about trying to "beat the problem". And once you figured out how to beat one problem, you tried to beat another one. According to the professors, industry had communicated to the universities that what was needed in the world of a professional engineer was being able to effectively solve problems in a group.

I was thinking about what all of this had to do with teaching and assisting children who, for whatever reason, were struggling with reading, writing, and communicating. If I think of a learning objective as a problem to beat, this problem would have to be clearly identified along with the desired outcome. A deadline would be needed. Depending on the class, the students might have decided what problems that wanted to try to beat. The problem would need an authentic purpose. As part of the learning process, there would be demonstrations and presentations where process and learning were shared with others. To me, what I witnessed at the college level felt like a workshop model of instruction. It made me wonder about my own use of learning targets. Are the learning targets I use clear and measurable? Do these targets have an authentic purpose? Have I established a clear path for achieving the targets? Do my students have a choice about ways to achieve a target? It also made me think about how teachers work in teams to beat problems.

Thinking About Tomatoes

Spending the last few days navigating icy roads and lake effect snow in the Upper Peninsula has me thinking about tomatoes. Springtime below the bridge is coming soon. The wind is crisp but the sky is bright and blue. No buds in the yard to speak of and the grass is brown but at least it isn't covered in white. I'm not a real gardener--not like my dad. Anything that happens to survive in my patch of dirt is a bonus. I started out fairly dedicated last year but I ended up distracted by other responsibilities. Even though I neglected them terribly, my tomatoes grew in abundance.