Program+Dispositions

//**Values change as an opportunity for improvement.**// I think that I am very proactive in pursuing change as a means for improvement. I have recently served on our district’s 21st Century Skills Team, participated in a Professional Learning Community and embraced learning how to use the Smartboard as a tool in my classroom.


 * Seminar Entries: As mentioned when I started this program, I believe myself to be a change agent. That has not changed in the past 18 months. I am involved in change as a PLC Leader, as a committee member of our district's 21st Century Skills Team, and as a new member of the CESA 7 Science Advisory Panel. I also feel that I am a change agent in the classroom. **** In the classroom, rather than ban it, I am using the technology that our digital natives have grown up with. This year alone, my students created websites about a disease process and produced a movie on climate. I am currently investigating how to flip my classroom, i.e., using blogs, websites and supplemental materials that my students can access outside the classroom for background information. It is within the classroom that I need to become more of a facilitator who provides real-world connections for our students than an information disseminator. **** I need to be aware of who is moving the cheese (Johnson, 1998). I need to be aware of the fact that the world is no longer flat (Friedman, 2007). And I need to become more globally competent (Zhao, 2009). I plan to continue to stay informed about these changes and to strive to be a positive change agent within my district. **
 * Please also see entry under Program Goals: // Envision and guide organizational change. //**

//**Understands people and relationships.**// This too, is an area of strength for me. Whenever I take a multiple intelligence assessment, I consistently score high in interpersonal relationships. I enjoy working collaboratively and with a variety of people.


 * Seminar Entries: This year, as PLC Leader of the 7th grade Science teachers, I took a primarily dysfunctional group and collaboratively created a collegial working environment where sharing and creating together were a priority. Evidence of this were the evaluations I received from the members of the group at the end of the year. For the 2012-13 school year, I face the challenge of combining this group with a strongly-opinionated, resistant-to-change group from 8th grade. Two things that I will keep in mind as I go forward in this venture are from John Collins's //Good to Great (2001):// get the right people on the bus and deal with the brutal facts. As a PLC leader, I can not do much about getting the right people on the bus, but I can deal with the brutal facts. I will share the school's goals and my own goals with my new PLC and keep coming back to the brutal facts if the team starts to falter or stray from our goals. **


 * //Non-discriminatory access, accommodations and assessments.//** To meet the needs of the many different learners that I have, I offer differentiated assignments and projects. Our house also accommodates the at-risk learning group, which per that program, have different accommodations and assessments built in. I utilize the concept of fairness not being so much that everyone gets the same things, but rather that fairness means everyone should get what they need. Although I have a baseline understanding of this disposition, I feel I can still improve.


 * Seminar Entries: As mentioned under Program Goals: //Diversity// on the previous page, the opportunity for working with students from an ethicnically diverse background is not abundantly possible in my school district. For that reason, it is vastly important that one of the things I do as a teacher is to role model the consideration of diverse opinions and perspectives about topics so that students of all types can use critical thinking skills to make decisions of their own. One of the curriculum projects that I worked on this summer promotes this type of role modeling. During our 7th grade science Weather & Climate unit, we will be having student view differing perspectives on the cause(s) of global warming. Students will also be given supplemental material representing both perspectives to read. The culminating project is an argumentative paper wherein the student will have to make his/her own decision regarding the cause of global warming. It would be very easy to just present one cause to the students and move on; however, as a team, we have decided to invest time in presenting two sides to the issue and letting students form their own opinion. I feel it is this type of instruction that will help my students have access to non-discriminatory information. **
 * Please also see entry under Program Goals: //Diversity//. **

//**Empathetic understanding.**// Having had children of my own that have very distinct needs when it came to learning, I feel that I am extremely empathetic towards a variety of different students and their needs.


 * Seminar Entries: **** Ruby Payne's (1996) framework for understanding poverty really hit a chord with me, despite her work being claimed as an example of deficit thinking. As Payne said, being a positive role model and offering an emotional resource to a child costs NOTHING. The middle school house structure is ideal for this. As a STRIDE Advocate, I have 15-18 children that I spend almost 20 minutes of non-instructional time per day. The purpose of this time is to foster a relationship with the students that extends beyond the normal teacher/student relationship. I help them set goals; I am the primary contact between the school and their home; I distribute consequences for academic and behavioral performances; and I celebrate their victories. I have the opportunity to know them as students and people better than any other teacher in school. The STRIDE group structure offers me, as a teacher, the opportunity to be either an additional emotional resource in their world, or sometimes, an only emotional resource in their world. **
 * I feel that many of my reflections regarding empathy are voiced under Program Goals: //Diversity.// **

//**Ethics.**// I consider myself a very ethical practitioner. I am guided by honesty and practicing the Golden Rule. I try to role model that to my students and hope that that is moreso what I am remembered for than being a good science teacher.


 * Seminar Entries: I feel that the case studies that we did in EDL 750 made making ethical decisions come alive for me. **
 * I felt that the case studies were quite relevant and realistic and they pushed me to really think about many different perspectives when making a decision. I found that a **** common thread to my solutions in most of the case studies was going back to what I believed to be my basic mission and vision statement when making ethical decisions. If the mission is student achievement, then I have to ask -- //How does this impact student achievement?// when making the big decisions. That's easier said than done as an educational leader. As Kowalski (2008) reminds us, decision-making considerations include three different spheres: the individual, the organization and the professional. There are a lot of stakeholders involved in any educational decision. Decision-making in the future will become even harder as school reform initiatives invade our world. **

//**Understanding oneself as a learner.**// I have had a lot of years to reflect on myself and the way I learn and have come to realize that I love learning. The only thing better than taking time for yourself to learn a new skill and then being able to implement it, is passing it on to another eager learner. I don’t think that I will ever be stagnant as a person or as a learner. I see myself pursuing and embracing learning for the rest of my life.


 * Seminar Entries: Being a reflective practitioner is the best way for me to continue understanding myself as a learner. Some of the biggest challenges ahead are pushing myself to be more globally competent, staying current with best practices, and balancing those challenges with keeping it real in my classroom. **
 * Zhao's writings, specifically those about being globally competent, really resonate with me. I will need to have "the skills, knowledge, and attitude to work effectively in our increasingly interdependent world." I will not only have to push myself to become more globally involved and to prepare for a virtual world, I will have to make this relevant to my students also. **
 * Best practices, to me, incorporate using newer and newer technology and more problem-based learning, and combining that with the "softer" 21st century skills such as collaboration, communication, creativity, and citizenship. One of the newer concepts that really intrigues me is "flipping" my classroom. I attended a webinar offered by our school district this spring on flipping my classroom and wanted more information, so I am signed up to attend another seminar on flipping the classroom offered by John Kuglin in the hopes that I will learn more that I can incorporate into my classroom **** . One of my preliminary ideas is in regards to preparing my 8th grade students for the WKCE in November. I want to offer standardized prep questions on my website that students have Monday through Thursday to solve. On Fridays, we will spend class time discussing the correct answers, but because they have had four days to look up the correct answers, I am expecting that many of them will have them all correct. Fridays will be spent examining // how // they came to the correct answers more than the actual answers. That way the instruction is done outside the classroom by the students utilizing technology to find the correct answers and the in-class activity -- either discussion or a hands-on activity -- can focus more on the understanding of how the answered was gained. **
 * With best practices, again, Zhao's voice resonates with me as he points out that although Americans think that countries like China are the models we should be following for success in education, we cannot forget the 21st century skills of communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. These are areas in which he feels the Chinese are lacking, and are actually studying our educational systems in order to increase achievement. So, our challenge becomes even bigger as we are driven by both test scores and 21st century competencies. **
 * And finally, I see education in the future as a real balancing act. We are moving from an organized, calm and slower-paced way of taking in information to a disorganized, frenzied and very fast-paced way. Students are used to getting their information in what Carr (2010) calls "snippets". The more we use our brains, the more the brain wants to be used. I worry that we will lose the sense of enjoyment in reading and/or learning as our brains evolve in this direction and that personalization in our communication will be lost. I am reminded of a book called //Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago// by LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman. There is a story within this book about a 5 year-old boy being dropped fourteen stories to his death because he wouldn't steal candy for his 10 year-old and 11 year-old assailants. When analyzed by the authors, it became apparent that the assailants were exposed to violence such as their own crime on a daily basis and were therefore desensitized to the value of life. Although a dramatic comparison, today's lack of personalization in communication could become the desensitized "norm" for this generation of students. Sending text messages without thinking of the ramifications because you are not face-to-face, cutting and pasting information from a source and claiming it as your own because it is "there", and accepting a story on the web as truth, when in fact there are many more perspectives to consider are all a part of today's teenagers' daily operating procedures. My balance, as an educator, is to make sure that while offering the ability to use the most up-to-date technology while working on relevant problems, that I also keep personalization and collaboration, the human things, a constant. **