TPGP

Teacher Professional Growth Plan

My second year of the education program has really opened my eyes to what aspects of my profession can be improved upon as I begin my teaching career. Many of these topics I have begun to work on, either during student-teaching or in the university classroom.

Assessment

It was a great learning experience to design rubrics during the great task and the student inquiry project in my final semester. I would like to take these skills further in my planning for assessment.

Goal: Continue to focus on planning ahead for assessment

Objectives to track progress:

• start unit planning by defining what I want my students to know at the end
• build assessment rubrics while designing student projects
• ensure that assessment is for learning as well as of learning

Goal: Continue to focus on rubric use for assessment

Objectives to track progress:

• search for good rubrics using tools such as IO
• develop rubrics myself and with my classes
• focus on clear, well articulated criteria for rubrics
• incorporate self and peer assessment of student work using rubrics

Goal: Design an effective record-keeping program to track student progress

Objectives to track progress:

• develop a spreadsheet with spaces for both grades and notes on student progress
• begin making daily notes on student progress
• refer to notes when discussing student progress with students and parents

Collaboration:

The importance of collaborating with classmates has been a recurring theme during my degree. I would like to continue collaborating with colleagues to better my practice.

Goal: Collaborate with other staff members to improve my teaching practice.

Objectives to track progress:

• renew subscription to ATA science council to keep up with current educational ideas in science
• show my unit/lesson plans to colleagues and ask for feedback
• ask to observe colleagues’ classes
• take questions I have about my practice to curriculum leaders and administration

Inquiry:

The potential educational benefits of inquiry-based learning have been emphasized during my program. With newfound confidence in developing inquiry projects based on designing projects in my final semester in Intelligence Online (IO), I hope to take this type of learning into my future classroom.

Goal: Develop inquiry-based science projects

Objectives to track progress:

• plan at least one inquiry-based task for students each course/semester
• continue working in IO to design authentic tasks
• meet with other teachers to discuss the possibility of cross-curricular projects

Classroom Structure/Atmosphere

Even within inquiry-based learning it is important to have structure and routine in the classroom setting to help student focus on their work.

Goal: Develop effective classroom routines that promote a comfortable learning environment

Objectives to track progress:

• develop a daily structure in my classroom so that students know what they are supposed to do when they enter each day
• get to know students as learners and individuals
• promote routines that help students collaborate effectively

Inquiring Independently

A discovery that I made while working on my independent inquiry is that it takes a long time to research an educational topic. Reading up on all the background and current information takes time. This made me realize that its a good thing I had the chance to investigate many issues in education during my degree, because it will be hard to find time to do it as a teacher.

The topic of my independent inquiry was investigating the gender gap in technology education. I realized through this inquiry that I have some personal biases when it comes to technology. I have become used to deferring to the men in my life when I have technology problems. Even examining this habit will be helpful as a teacher, because as I learned through my research the relationship I have with technology will likely affect my students. I was also surprised to learn how many embedded gender-related messages can be present in today’s technology such as video games.

The big revelation from my study was that one of the best, most inclusive ways to teach students to use technology is to do exactly what we have been learning about in our Technology and Inquiry class: design tasks where students are using technology in an engaging and authentic way. I learned that context is one of the most important things in making technology inclusive for all. It’s convenient, because I really like the type of teaching we have been talking about all semester. I am excited to teach using great inquiry projects with technology embedded in them. Now I have one more reason that this is a great way to teach. As a beginning teacher, I am always looking for the proof to justify what I am going to be doing in the classroom so that I can speak to parents and other educators about it eloquently. That’s the nice thing about the independent inquiry: it gives me that experience in communicating why I think inquiry based teaching is a good idea.

The Big One: The IO Unit

The idea of planning an entire unit, especially one that is supposed to take up 40% of the time spent in Biology 30, at first seemed like a huge feat. It surprised me how easily the ideas started to flow once we had a task in mind. Planning a unit that incorporates both inquiry and technology in an authentic way is certainly easier with IO. There, I said it, I’m a total convert!

Looking back, the reason the unit inquiry flowed so well was because of the way IO lays things out. It is much easier to incorporate technology and inquiry when you are starting with key understandings and a great task. It really answers the big question of “what do I need the students to be able to do” or “what do I really want the students to remember” as a result of this unit. Once that has been defined, the steps for getting there can be decided upon. It is effective to look at the end task and break it down into more manageable pieces such as smaller tasks for the students to do along the way. Once we had been working on that for a while, we realized that we had almost planned the day to day activities for an entire unit, and it was fun as opposed to painful.

Collaborating on a project such as this one has many benefits. One of my favorite things was working in IO for a while, getting tired or running out of ideas, and then logging in later to find that my partner had been working on it too. His contributions would re-inspire me and give me more ideas. The project definitely took a different shape than if I had done it alone. I work more systematically, and when collaborating you have to be flexible to let things develop. I think in the end it was definitely a richer project as a result of the collaboration.

A big question to consider is: how do we know that technology was incorporated in a meaningful way in our unit? In our project, I see technology being used in several ways. One way students would use technology is in their research. The weekly discussions would push students to find information that will be most current on the internet while encouraging them to look critically at their sources. The website itself is very important because in constructing it students will look at how persuasive advertising is used in science. Many websites out there use scientific words (or scientific-sounding words) to lure the layman in. I find this exceptionally dangerous when it comes to health-related products. My hope would be that in the process of constructing this website, students will be de-constructing what they see in internet media and become more conscious consumers. This will not necessarily happen on its own, which is why an activity based on evaluating medical websites was included. I also believe that internet advertising is incredibly important now, and will be in the future. It is the most common method of advertising for biotechnology and health-related products, so the task of developing a website is true to the profession.

Reflecting back on the project, I think that we did a lot of things well. We were able to clearly define the key understandings that our students should take away, and our project incorporates the controversy and relevance to society that make it really interesting. My one wish is just that we had gone even more in depth with our planning. I think that we laid out our expectations for the website very well, and we worked hard on what the assessment criteria would be. In laying out our expectations for the website, it became clear how much work the students would have to do to get to the point where their understandings would be good enough to make such a website. That is how we started designing activities leading up to the website. Some of our activities have a very defined product and rubric, while others are still just a concept. This was mentioned in our peer feedback, and came as no surprise. My vision for the unit, if I were to continue planning it, would be that the activities for inquiring into genetics would fall under four categories that would each have their own assessment rubric: researched discussions followed by journalling or blogging (already in the unit), experiments/activities that help students inquire into the concepts (we had one example of this with the Mendelian genetics, but there could be more), modeling of the concepts with physical or digital models (already in the unit), and the great task website. This way there would be ample time for students to get used to the format of assessment and assess their own progress on labs and discussions as the unit progressed. This way there also wouldn’t have to be a separate rubric for each topic/activity.

The peer feedback was very helpful in opening our eyes to other possibilities. One of the most interesting comments we received was regarding the final product. It was mentioned that perhaps we should give more options to express the final product than just a website. I thought about this, but I am still happy with the decision to make it a website based on my earlier rant about internet literacy.

This project really helped me to achieve my professional goals as well as opening my eyes to how important lifelong learning is as a teacher. I was able to plan using technology in a way that is interesting and authentic. I was able to continue to work on assessment. This is what I believe to be so important, especially as I see how much it helps students succeed when they understand the assessment criteria (seems like a no-brainer, but it really seems to be an under-utilized concept in education). I am looking forward to improving my assessment practices over time as I see how effective my rubrics and feedback loops are in real life.

I believe that the future for this project is bright. I think that it can definitely be used for a Biology 30 or Science 30 class, and could be adapted for other science courses as well. It will need a bit of tweaking in order to get it totally ready for the classroom, and it will likely get some more tweaking after its first run with real students. But that's teaching!

A memorable lesson

On Friday, March 12 we had a memorable speaker. Dr. Sharon Friesen came to talk to us about what inquiry looks like in the classroom. She discussed how to plan for inquiry in the classroom, and indicated that Alberta Education is pushing for inquiry in all programs of study. Upon discovering that she not only used to teach high school, but also had access to the Minister for Education, I had to pose the following question:
"How does the Minister for Education see the future of an inquiry based curriculum in conjunction with grade 12 diploma exams?"
Dr. Friesen had some pretty good responses to that. First of all, she described the vision for changing the way our grade 12 students are evaluated at the end of a course. She indicated that the province is entertaining the idea of developing assessment that is more holistic than just multiple choice testing. Of course, this might be expensive. Dr. Friesen indicated that the best way to make these funds available would be to reduce provincial achievement tests in grades 3, 6, and 9 to their intended purpose, a snapshot. It would then not be required to test every child, and money would become available.
Dr. Friesen provided some very practical, sensible help for negotiating inquiry within the context of the current system of diploma exams in Alberta. Her technique was based on her own personal experiences as a high school teacher, and it seems like something that all of us who hope to teach high school can take with us. She said don't ignore diploma exams, but don't fret either. Teach the course through inquiry, but reserve three weeks at the end of the year to prepare for the diploma exam. Have the students analyze the curriculum and map it. They can make sure that all the big topics have been covered by their work that semester. Teach the students about the way multiple choice tests are constructed. Explain the different types of questions, and what they are assessing. Explain how the answers are generated, and what each answer is trying to do. Then have students construct multiple choice questions on the curriculum topics. Discuss the answers, and why they are correct or incorrect. Have students trade student-made exams and try them. This way, students are not only deeply knowledgeable in the curriculum, but also have an excellent understanding of how to write multiple choice exams.
This information may just help some of us, as new teachers, take the leap into inquiry at the grade 12 level.

In Response to the Great Task

This activity of actually doing a great task is very valuable for learning how you might carry it out in a classroom. First of all, you get a very good idea of how long the task might take and how much work goes into it. How frustrating it would be for students if their teacher set unreasonable expectations for completing a task when they were new to the technology and trying to learn class material at the same time. Another valuable lesson from completing the great task is learning about what is possible with a project. Doing it yourself gives you a good idea of what can reasonably be expected from students and what a final product looks like. Then you also have an exemplar for your students. Not only that, it’s helpful to work on your assessment procedure as you work on the great task because you learn what is difficult, what requires more direction, and what really helps students with their learning of the topic.

There were definitely some frustrations that occurred during this process. The most significant frustration was the fact that the majority of our work was done over reading break and when group members were out of the city. That means we didn’t have many opportunities to work on the task together in person. We ended up dividing up the work and then posting our work for the other people in the group to comment on and revise. While this was still collaboration, it meant that not everyone got experience using the different types of technology used in our task.

I learned a great deal about using technology for learning while doing this task. Every project I have done this semester with groups, even in other classes, has helped me learn more about the power of online collaboration with Google Docs. I also learned more about the power of a presentation program like Keynote through Darren’s work with making a presentation into a video using the animation features. It is very useful to know what is possible with certain programs. In addition, I gained some experience using online rubric building tools in IO, which will be very useful to me as I begin my work as a teacher. I love that these rubrics can be saved and easily revised without any formatting issues.

Completing the task helped me work toward some of my professional goals because it gave me more insight into completing hands-on work with high school students. This is something that I really want to focus on in my teaching. I also learned the power of simulations or models. When you are trying to design a simulation that will be able to teach others, you have to know and understand the topic in much greater depth than you would just to answer questions on a test. The learning is also deeper because you are attributing words and images to the concepts learned in class, and you have do some of your own research to come up with the final product. This project lead me towards my personal goal of finding meaningful ways to go deeper into topics with students. The model or simulation and newspaper article give students different ways to construct and show their understanding, which is something I would love to see more of in the science classroom.

My strengths with regards to contribution to this group were the ability to see the project as a whole and understand what little things needed to be done to put it all together. I felt like I was often managing a bit. I organized email updates, made sure everyone in the group knew what everyone else was doing, and addressed the components like the rubric the description of the task and the feedback form for peer review. As a weakness, I was not able to help out with the movie because I didn’t have the knowledge/perseverance/creativity that Darren had to be able to figure out how to do it. When we started we had no idea what program to use to make a model or simulation, and it was challenging to try out different programs and fail.

The comment that we received multiple times during the peer review process was to be more explicit about what is meant by a model. This is very important for enacting this great task in a classroom setting. The model as we presented it is perhaps too open-ended. Students would need some ideas of where to start and some technologies that they might use to do it. It might be useful in a class to narrow it down and say that everyone has to do an animation or a video using one or two different technologies. That still gives students lots of flexibility in how they actually carry out the task.

Our peers liked the project because of its application to multiple intelligences, the way the newspaper article made the product accessible and meaningful to a wider audience, how the references to celebrities and pop culture makes it interesting to high school students, and how the task could be transferable to other subject areas as well. Some suggestions on the final product were to slow down the text in the video, to include definitions from sources other than Wikipedia, and include a section in the rubric to address the students' use of technology.

The peer editing process was very valuable. We were able to gain ideas from things that other groups had done, like the evaluating of websites and careful referencing of images. The feedback we received was valuable because peers not only gave us ideas on how to make our end product really strong but also gave us suggestions on how to enact the task in the classroom. Seeing other group’s work gave me exposure to new technologies I hadn’t used before and ideas for great projects.

In Response to My Showcase

I started out to present my Showcase on February 5 confident that I had something to teach my fellow students about SmartBoard use. I had used a SmartBoard in my practicum and was quite used to navigating the technology. There were a couple of things that I didn't expect, however.

1. I forgot that the SmartBoards at the University of Calgary come as a board, projector, and computer with all the required pieces and cables to connect it all and make it work. Setting this up actually requires a lot more thought than just turning on a SmartBoard that has its own projector and is all set up and calibrated. Despite my comfort with Smart technology, cables are my nemesis. I never seem to be able to figure out where they are suppose to go, likely due to a blind panic that ensues when presented with the problem, usually in front of a group of people with some sort of time restriction. Luckily, I had cable-competent partner to work with. Darren helped me conquer my fear of cables and I know now that I could set up any SmartBoard, anywhere, anytime.

2. It's one thing to know how to use the technology, but after several classes in Technology and Inquiry I realized that how you use and what you use it for are often more important. I was reminiscing about an experience I had where a teacher invited me to see him use a SmartBoard in his class. He was very excited about it, and I was thrilled to go and experience his classroom. Sitting there, I quickly realized that the SmartBoard was truly being used as a plain old whiteboard in this situation. The class was not terribly interesting, and the students didn't appear to be gaining anything from the SmartBoard. Having been in the Inquiry in Technology class for several weeks now, I realize that technology shouldn't be used to do something that you can just as easily do without it. Instead, the students should be pushed to think in new ways. That became the focus of the showcase. We wanted to show how teachers can use Smart technology, but more importantly how students can use the boards and engage in inquiry.

To accomplish this, one of our main goals was to get the class up using it in our presentation. The scrambled photos that Darren found were perfect for this, and they ended up being more than just a way for the class to get comfortable with the board. As I watched the two groups work, I realized just how powerful it could be having a problem that needs to be solved where every student can help but only one student can actually touch the board at a time. I think this could be very useful in a lot of areas of cooperative problem solving. In addition, I think that the group felt comfortable working at the SmartBoard because they were in a group, which is something to utilize for shy groups who are not comfortable working at the board in front of their peers. We tried to emphasize how programs can be used interactively by the students as well, including interactive animations and concept mapping software.

Overall, I believe the presentation went well. We were asked some excellent questions about the meaningful use of the technology, and I developed many ideas about my future use of SmartBoards through the preparation and presentation of this showcase. A few things that I would change if I were to do it again: I would have like to foster class discussion and questions a bit better, and I would have liked to have even more opportunities for my classmates to use the SmartBoards. I am glad that I took on this task, and it just shows that even as a presenter who has used the technology there is always something to learn.

The First Post

Last Friday was day one of my adventure into the world of technology as it applies to education. Growing up, I had little use for technology. With a brother who was interested in video games, computer games, and gadgets, I was content to do my own thing and read books and bake cookies. This trend continued when I moved away for my first year of university. Instead of buying me a computer to assist in my studies, my parents gave me an acoustic guitar to take with me. Luckily, the guitar attracted a cute boy who loves technology and introduced me to the world of Macs. I started to explore a little bit with some of the fun programs, and became relatively effective at using them.

When I started the MT program, I really got to explore technology. I was told to be creative with my assignments, and I ended up making some really neat projects using Garage Band, Pages, iWeb and iPhoto. I was able to see firsthand how using this technology in my projects opened up a whole new world for me and let my creativity shine through. It also made me much more interested in completing my projects because I was having fun exploring the programs as well as producing my projects.

In semester three of the MT program I was lucky enough to have a Smartboard in my classroom during my student teaching experience. It was a new toy for my partner teacher as well, so we had lots of fun figuring it out together. I started planning all of my lessons on it, and was really pleased with the ease at which I could transition from notes to pictures or videos and include more multimedia for my students. While I became good at using the Smartboard, I didn't get the students using it as much as I wanted to. Two things stood in the way of that. One, it was difficult to find interactive lessons at the grade level I was teaching so I had to create them myself. Secondly, I had to get the students over their fear of standing in front of the class using the Smartboard. This brought up some questions for me that I would like to explore further during this course. For example, even if you have lots of technological resources available to you, how do you set up your classroom so that all students can access the technology and use it effectively? What does this technology savvy classroom look like, and how is it managed? I am also interested in how to go about setting up inquiry projects for students involving internet searches because I haven't seen that done during my student-teaching.

I believe that the strengths I bring to this class are my experience with some of the popular educational programs and my desire to learn about the big picture of using technology in the classroom. By big picture I mean what the classroom will look like and what kinds of activities promote learning on many levels. This includes learning about the topic, learning how to use the technology, and learning to collaborate with others.

It is amazing that while I had no use for technology as a child, it now affects pretty much everything I do. Who would have thought a few years ago that my dad, after sending me off to university with just a guitar, would now be emailing me songs that he recorded on his computer and web conferencing with me to talk about it!