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Mike Beetham Building Inclusion, Challenging Topics, Diverse Learning Needs, Learning About Your Students, Making a Difference Through Education

More Than A Student

This past several months have been very challenging as it seems we have plateaued and are not progressing as I would expect us to at this time of the year. Thanks to a young girl in my class, I was reminded just how important it is to remember that I work with children and not adults.

Every morning the bell rings and I expect all of us to move into high gear in order to accomplish the day’s agenda. I am ready to give my absolute best effort (proverbial 125%) and have developed the expectation in the class that each person’s part is to put forth their best effort. Sometimes I can get lost in the tidal wave of curriculum expectations and forget that each and every day my students go home to a life that I often know little about. They come to school with many situations that can either contribute or detract from their success. I was reminded of just how important it is to take the time to check in with my class on a daily basis. This past month one of my students was going through some horrific custodial scenarios and yet she continued to come to school and attempted to live the classroom standards. She was not making the gains she had set and therefore put more pressure on herself, which ended up creating results that were not helpful from either a personal or academic standpoint.

My primary role at that time should not have been academics and curriculum accomplishment but rather meeting her social/emotional needs. Which in turn would have helped her where she needed it most.

Kelly.McLaughlin Assessment, Inquiry, Students as Teachers

Inquiry and science

When talking about inquiry, teachers are always challenged with what to do to guide students in the right direction or to even give them any type of direction. I thought back to my university courses this time last year and thought about the way my peers and I presented a topic. We were allowed to choose a topic,choose our groups and then choose how to present it. This way we planned our own route to success and found topics that interested us.

I decided to present this approach to my class with our current flight unit. I gave them the choice of curriculum expectations and then they chose how to teach a lesson to the class with any methods they desired to use. My students just need to involve the audience and create a handout for students to refer to after the presentations. So far I have seen students creating paper airplanes, making websites, making pontoon, making videos, interviewing different people and creating exciting and engaging lessons for their class.

I did use the rubric from the growing success document but I feel that assessing my student’s projects are more than that rubric. So for me, the challenge is finding out how to assess these authentic student tasks. I wish that it was simple but I am finding that I do not know how to figure out the best way to “mark” my grade sixes.