Teaching as a Profession

Coming into Teach for America I had preconceptions about what teaching would look like. I thought it would be fairly straightforward, I would teach students academic content on math, reading, writing, science and social studies. I thought it would involve grading papers and giving feedback. However, the entire experience became significantly different than I had originally envisioned. I realized that as an educator, my voice can leave the four walls of my classroom to impact change in a different sphere. That teaching as a profession means also being an advocate for your students. The way I found myself doing this to the fullest potential is advocating through Educators 4 Excellence where I can use my writing to spread awareness. This article I wrote for MinnPost serves as an example of how I realized my voice and passions can serve as a pathway to greater advocacy as a teacher.

I realized as a teacher I wielded a lot of power in how we communicate expectations and carry out discipline practices to students. In the article I was able to call on personal stories that helped me take what I was learning in the classroom to a more public sphere. The opening story about Jeremiah taught me that the stories in the classroom are impactful in creating a bigger picture of the story of educational inequities in our schools. I was then able to call upon data in our district, the place where I invest myself the most, to see how these small stories play out in reality. I never thought something like data collection in the realm of policy would be something I would do as an educator.

The most impactful part of the article that changed the way I saw teaching was when I wrote about the alternatives to suspensions. At this point I realized that as an educator I could voice my opinions on solutions to larger problems. Rather than just restating and telling others of the problems that exist, the alternatives section allowed me to advocate on behalf of students by suggesting things that work in the classrooms. Going past that, I was able to advocate on behalf of a bill that included more inclusionary practices near the end of the article. That allowed me to give a call to action for educators.

Reflecting through the lens of a second year teacher and opportunities I have had for advocacy, teaching has become equal parts developing and preparing children to be leaders and successful in the world as well as advocating for them in the policy sphere. Through this, and what the article shows, I learned that as a teaching professional I have multiple masks I wear and each of them are uniquely necessary in the fight for educational equity. As I continue to reflect on what teaching means to me, I hope to engage parents and families more in the process of policy advocacy. They play such a large role in the lives of the students we are advocating for and more likely than not, the bills that are being passed have a direct impact on them. In “Everyday Engagement” Katy Ridnouer discusses the importance of meaningful parent engagement. She states how important it is to change our perspective of parent engagement from tallying the number of times we make contact to thinking of significant ways parents can participate in the schooling process, both outside and inside the school. I see policy advocacy as a unique way to engage parents and families, either through writing op-eds for newspapers or advocating at the capitol.

Feedback

We have been working on placing fractions and decimals on a number line as a strategy to help order fractions and decimals. Students use various strategies to do so, sometimes converting fractions into decimals or drawing pictures of the fractions to help them understand what they are looking for. The learning objective for this exit ticket was twofold. First, “I can compare and order fractions and decimal numbers” as well as “I can locate fractions and decimal numbers on a number line”.

The feedback provided to Irvin gave strategies to help him meet the learning objectives. When comparing and ordering fractions or placing them on a number line, Irvin does not yet seem to have a conceptual understanding of fractions. He correctly identified that ⅘ is the same as 8/10. I drew a picture to help show him how he might have come to that understanding. I was hoping that this strength would help him understand his misconception about where to place “A”.

The area for improvement for Irvin is identifying how much 4/4 is equal to. It’s clear that he does not have an understanding that the number line is split into 10ths and not ones. It seems like he placed the 4/4 at the 4/10 place because he might have seen the “4” and made a connection. I drew out an empty rectangle into fourths to have him fill it out and understand that if he filled out all four pieces he would be filling out the entire bar which would be equal to a whole. In my conversation with him and on the picture on the exit ticket we talked about how the number line could be thought of as a bar split into tenths as well. Both the picture split into fourths and the number line split into tenths helped him understand that the section where he put A was less than a whole while 4/4 was exactly one whole. I also wanted to use his strength of identifying that ⅘ is equivalent to 8/10 with the drawing to help him make the same connection to 4/4.

My next steps with Irvin include doing a small, differentiated math group in which we work on conceptualizing fractions and ordering just fractions before mixing fractions and decimals. I will start out with helping him understand visually what different fractions might look like with fraction circles or drawing it out before moving on to ordering them and then placing them on a number line. Once he has a solid understanding of the fractions then I’ll move on to comparing and ordering fractions and decimals in order to place them on a number line.

The feedback provided to Gisselle worked on supporting her understanding of where to place fractions and decimals that are greater than a whole on the number line. She correctly identifies that ⅘ is the same thing as 8/10 by using the strategy of multiplying both the top and bottom by the same number to get a number in the tenths. I drew a picture on the side to help her visualize her thinking too with pictures in the hope that it helps her with her area for growth.

Gisselle incorrectly identified 1.2 as just 2/10. She does not have a solid understanding that place values to the left of the decimal indicate something that is larger than one and place values to the right of the decimal indicate partitioning numbers into less than one. I wrote out what her 1.2 is in words to have her understand that we are talking about one whole and two tenths. Then I drew a picture of what it would look like so she could see that we colored in a full bar and only a small portion of another bar. In my conversation with her, we talked about how that decimal was greater than a whole and where it would go on the number line then. She automatically identified that it would have to be past 1 and then understand that two lines after that would be two additional tenths.

Next steps with Gisselle include similar strategies that I used with Irvin. I am going to do a small, differentiated math group with her in which we conceptualize mixed numbers and decimals greater than a whole in placing them on the number line. I will start out with mixed numbers and have Gisselle draw out pictures of what it would look like. Then after she has a solid understanding of mixed numbers, I’ll add in decimals that are greater than one and do the same thing with drawing pictures of what those look like. Through this she will have a visual understanding of the decimals and fractions and will be able to use that to help her place the numbers on a number line.

 


Something that I will use to support both learners are number talks and math routines as established in “Mathematics Routine Banks” established by San Diego City Schools. I will have a fraction on the board and have students represent the fraction in as many ways as possible. This will include a hundredths chart, other pictorial representations, word form, decimal symbols, and a number line. Each time we find a new way to represent a fraction, I’ll have students record that in their notebooks. This will support Gisselle and Irvin to see that fractions can be represented in a multitude of ways and each way they can be represented can be another strategy for placing them on number lines.

Visuals

Identifying and interpreting figurative language is a large standard for fifth grade students but is often one that results in the most confusion. It is especially hard when thinking about English language learners when they have to be able to go past interpreting phrases literally with a limited vocabulary. Therefore, visuals have been a crucial component of ensuring success in interpretation of figurative language. The lesson I focused on was on identifying and interpreting personification in given contexts. I also wanted to extend their thinking further by having them create their own posters describing and showing a personification phrase. I relied heavily on visuals for each phrase while creating the lesson.

I started by using the Visual Thinking Strategy which was created by Abigal Housen, a cognitive psychologist in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. According to her theory, students learn the most when they have opportunities to interpret visuals for themselves. So I put up the picture of the newspaper with a hand (the last visual on the “student handout” sheet). I simply asked, “what do you think this picture is representing? Why?” and had students do a turn and talk. I made sure there were no words on this flipchart accompanying the picture so students had the opportunity to understand that there were no right or wrong answers and to produce an authentic answer. Student responses included things along the line of “There is a newspaper that seems to be going somewhere or traveling”. After the class came to a consensus on this, I revealed the phrase next to it which said, “News travels quickly” and immediately got responses like “Wait, news can’t travel!” and produced a debate among other students about what this really meant. Using this visual opened the conversation about things being literal and figurative. This way students were creating the definition prior to reading the personification sentence. In a way, they already knew what the personification meant before reading the figurative language. They were working backwards relying solely on the visual.

After doing a few more Visual Thinking Strategies, students were able to create their own definition of personification. They realized that nonhuman objects were being given human like qualities. I then pointed to the visual of the lemonade poster/personification definition which hangs in my room. This visual aided students who were having a hard time grasping the concept by having a concrete definition there accompanied by another pictoral example. I then went back to the Visual Thinking Strategy and used the picture of the dancing flame (below). This time students were aware that we were looking for figurative language but responded similarly to the question “what do you notice?” All students were able to say a flame going back and forth. When I revealed the sentence “the flame of the candle danced in the dark” students were able to quickly make the connection that the flame was not actually dancing but it was flickering in the darkness.

The last visual I used was the personification handout (below). At first the words were covered up. Students were tasked with looking at the picture and guessing what the personification sentence might be and then checking it with the actual sentence. This forced students to try to create their own human quality for a non human object, going one step further than how I used the previous visuals. The visual aided them in coming up with a sentence but this was a lot more challenging for them than just interpreting sentence with visuals.

I used three pieces of evidence to gauge if visuals aided students. The first piece of evidence had students interpret the meaning of personification sentences. The evidence of student work below showed me that the student was effectively able to use the visuals and anchor chart I gave her to understand that the sentences were not literal and each object was given a human quality. The second piece of evidence had students create their own personification sentences given a prompt. The evidence showed that the student was able to take the visuals we discussed and create sentences based on what we learned. However, the evidence showed a misconception that wasn’t captured in the visuals we studied. In numbers four and five she wrote a simile rather than personification. Next time when considering which visuals I use, I’ll put a comparison visual up that contrasts a simile with personification. The third piece of evidence was a mini project on personification where students did research by coming up with a definition and picture to support their understanding. This showed me how they could create their own visuals to support their learning rather than just interpreting visuals.

Evidence:

Examples on flipchart:

Handout given to students:

Student created posters