10. Understand the political climate and decide how to deal with it. Without question, the hardest thing for me to deal with starting out was the realities of No Child Left Behind and the ever-looming presence of standardized testing and Adequate Yearly Progress. In some ways, I think of my experiences as a college undergraduate as being stuck in this grand ivory tower where I learned about how education should be, not how it often is. It was incredibly daunting to have so much of my success as a teacher measured by an annual multiple choice test, and I grew to resent the constant school mandates for more testing in preparation for standardized testing. Some schools spend so much time testing kids that it makes you wonder when they actually find the time to teach. What I eventually realized is that my idealized teacher education classes prepared me incredibly well for this climate. The best way to prepare students for standardized tests is to teach the material well in the first place. When you create and implement inquiry-based science units that really develop the students' understanding of the material, the stripped down standardized test questions will seem easy by comparison. I think too many teachers give up and cope with the demands of testing by trying to teach to the test. It's neither necessary nor effective, and to be honest, it's just not fun for you or the students. Stick with what you know, remember what your courses and instructors have taught you, and don't give up the idealism that I know you're starting your career with. The current political climate toward education is not sustainable, and over time, best practices like those you've been taught will prevail. Standardized tests are important and they have a role to play, but they're just one tool in a much larger assessment toolbox. The more you remember that and teach with rigor for conceptual understanding, the better off you and your students will be.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
New Teacher Tip #10
Thursday, October 22, 2009
New Teacher Tip #3
Tip #3: Trust Your Instincts.
In my first year of teaching, I was assigned two classes of fifth-grade math. One was a section of the average students at the grade level, and the other was the bottom 20 students. Georgia has an annual standardized test that is administered in all grades and fifth graders are required to pass the math and reading sections to be promoted to middle school. It's high stakes testing at its worst. You can only imagine the pressure that I felt with a class of the lowest performing students. Many of them were years behind grade-level, unable to do things like subtract with regrouping or multiply and divide with one or two digit numbers. It was unfathomable to me how I was going to teach the fifth grade standards such as multiplying and dividing fractions and decimals. Whenever I discussed this with my administrators, I received the same response over and over: "You have to teach the standards."
The dirty secret about standards is that even with pacing guides, you have a lot of flexibility about how much time you allot to different topics. During my unit on measurement, for example, I was able to spend weeks covering one- and two-digit multiplication. The actual time spent applying that to finding the area of quadrilaterals was small in comparison to the amount of time developing a conceptual understanding of multiplication, but in the end they got it. My lesson plans consistently reflected that I was teaching the standards relating to area – and I was – but maybe not in the way that I imagine the state or district envisioned. Be crafty, reach out for help, and remember that you know your students best. If you identify fundamental weaknesses that need to be remedied before moving on, do it. It's far better to teach fundamentals and build understanding than add to confusion.
