Building Capacity for Presence

 
Building a capacity to live a present lifestyle has been an ongoing focus of mine ever since I became aware of the spiritual practice.  For me, being present is rooted in a kind of spirit awakening that enables me to live a more authentic life.  My desire and commitment to being present is practiced in all areas of my life.  My whole being desires to live in a state of being present.  The features of presence can include but are not limited to:  critical self-reflection, purposeful, spirit-filled, open, empathic, together-focused, self/other-accepting, love centered, relational risk taking, and imaginative relationship building.  Of course, these are very lofty features that can be life transforming as well as difficult to integrate into the whole being.  I seem to cycle these features throughout my personal and professional life.  Sometimes I find myself easily shedding my layers that bind me and other times I need to be broken open in order to be transformed anew.

Within my profession over the past year, I feel like I have both shed and broken open new awakenings as I have ventured through my educational program.  I have been so present in my classroom with my kids.  I am noticing new heights of personal engagement as well as student engagement.  By putting into practice new strategies that meet kids where they are at, I have been able to be more purposeful, open, and imaginative in my teaching.  I feel so connected with the students.  When they come into my room I look at them all and practice bringing all of my presence to them.  I am engaging with them as little humans instead of just teaching them curriculum.  This has been a shedding of layers for me.  There are other areas in the school setting I have had to be broken open in order to even begin being present.  I have really struggled with trying to be in control and making things happen instead of letting them unfold.  I react to situations to quickly which gets me into trouble.  By reacting, I am not being present to the situation; rather, I am trying to control it and manipulate the outcome.  Nowhere in the features of being present does it mention control and manipulation; yet, one feature that is mentioned is critical self-reflection.  Reflection is definitely something I am willing and open to practice.  By being aware of and willing to work on the areas that reveal themselves to me throughout my life, I will continue to strive towards developing a deeper state of presence.     

 

 

 

 

Technology and SAMR Model

One of my goals this year is to integrate technology into weekly instruction to support teaching and learning.

      *I began using Ipads and Educreations with my students a couple weeks ago.  First, I incorporated 2nd grade vocabulary from the basal into an Educreation activity that was described in detail on my previous blog.  This past week the students used the Ipad camera and Educreations to modify a story from their basal called, "Helping Out".  They took pictures that showed "helping out" around ORE. Next they organized the pictures and wrote a sentence for each page.  They had to incorporate the weekly vocab. words within the sentences as well.  Lastly, they practiced and recorded their voices reading the story.  The project took much longer than I had anticipated but the end product was really well done.  I emailed them to their classroom teachers and they loved them.  Some showed them to the whole class while others posted them on their schoology page.  These activities are engaged the students and providing higher level technology integration into my groups.  Redefinition was my goal and my goal was accomplished.  Yes, kids could recreate stories in the past, but they couldn't take current photos, words, and their voice and put it all together to create a techno book.  As a result of this, I have a couple girls wanting to make their own book.  When I give them some free time on the Ipads, they ask if they can work on their book.  I am pleasantly surprised by their interest level.  Overall, I am engaged and happy with how I am accomplishing my goal so far and so are the kids.

Technology Goals

The district that I work in is committed to the implementation of Technology in the classroom.  All students have a device from grades 5-12.  In the elementary level, the students have a set of Ipads to share within each grade level.  In Title 1, I have three Ipads to use with my students and I share these with another Title 1 teacher for part of the day.  Each year, I need to write goals and submit them to my principal.  This year, I needed to include a technology goal as well.  I have been reading and watching videos about 21st Century Learning with a focus on the 4 C's.  My technology goal this year is centered around creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication.  By using technology in learning, students become engaged in ways they can't when using textbooks to perform paper/pencil tasks.  There is so much more available to them when able to explore the world in a single click, and to engage in collaborative learning by brainstorming and using technology in creative ways.  I am keeping in mind that my goal is to get to modification and redefinition. Here are two goals for the 13-14 school year:  

1.  Improve my knowledge and skills in order to integrate technology into my instruction.

     *I have started working on this goal by watching videos and reading on how to incorporate technology into the classroom curriculum.  I have gotten some great ideas that will move my integration from

substitution (last year) to modification and redefinition.

2.  Integrate technology into weekly instruction to support teaching and learning.

      *I began using Ipads and Educreations with my students last week.  I took vocabulary words from their 2nd grade basal story and passed them out to each group of two students.  Then, they walked around the school and took pictures of what they thought represented their vocab. words.  For example, one group had the word enormous so they went outside and took a picture of the school because they said it was enormous.  They had so much fun deciding on what they would photograph and how it related to their word. We talked about freedom to explore and to make decisions on their own.  They kept looking to me for approval.  They were not use to the freedom to think outside the box and to actually have fun with the learning.  We also talked about categorizing and sorting pictures.  One word was turnip and they said there wasn't one in the building.  That led to a discussion about ways you could categorize pictures like shape, color, food, texture.  We are going to keep expanding on this learning.  This week the students are going to modify a story in their basal called, "Helping Out".  They will first take pictures that show "helping out" around ORE. Then to integrate writing, they will write on the picture pages and and use their own voice to read the story.  I can hardly wait to see how this will turn out.  They are excited and so am I.

Blogging Community November Strategies

A celebration that I had this past week was with two kindergarten boys that I see.  I have been working on my AR plan during their group time.  I am working on getting them up, running around, crawling, throwing balls, etc... in order to engage them in gender specific learning strategies.  I did a letter check on them when I started mid October and they each knew 1 letter.  On Friday I did a check and they knew 14 and 16 letters.  After less than two weeks of the change in instruction, I would say that it has been making a difference so far.

Marzano's, What works in Schools - Translating Research Into Action....Reflection

What do I think are “The Worst of Times” in education today:

                -standardized testing and just plain testing

                -so much responsibility on teachers to do and be everything for kids

                -reduced federal/state funding of schools

                -support from families – volunteering, etc… because life is moving so fast at home

                -student experiences/educational gaps – some come with so much/some come with

                  nothing

                -pressure and anxiety on students to be high achievers in order to go to college

                -people who refuse to change because they’ve ALWAYS done it a certain way

                -inability to let staff/administration go if they aren’t doing their job

                -lack of professional development when new initiatives are introduced

What do I think are “The Best of Times” in education today:

                -well prepared teachers coming out of college

                -advances in technology and integration into education

                -so much research being performed on best practices, curriculum , etc…

                -opportunities for students to go on to post-secondary education

                -Some testing- better identify students in need of targeted interventions…ability to know

                  benchmarks/growth

Marzano starts off his article sharing what he sees as the worst of times over the last 60 years in education.  Much of what he shares focuses on how education does not affect a student’s achievement.  This was thought to be primarily due to the strong influence of a student’s home life.  Researchers wrote how failure in school was not the fault of schools at all.  At the turn of the century, new research was coming out that directly opposed these findings.  In fact, research began to show that students from all backgrounds could be very successful if the school was a highly effective school.  Excuses for why kids were failing were finally being exposed by new research.  Now, it is becoming well known that highly effective schools can have considerable impact on the growth and achievement of students regardless of their personal backgrounds.   This impact can be categorized into three general factors, 1) school-level factors, 2) teacher-level factors, and 3) student-level factors.  Looking at my above worst of time thoughts, most of them fit into once of the three areas, but they are all excuses as to why it is difficult being in education today.  They are not rooted in any kind of research, especially Marzano’s research.  According to Marzano, by having a highly effective school, none of my ideas play any part into student achievement.  My thoughts on the best of times can also fall into the three general factors for effective schools.  They are all based on the student, teacher, or school. 

I do agree with Marzano’s research that finds all students can be successful when being educated in a highly effective school.  I look forward to reading more about what characteristics these schools have in common.  I also see that my school and I need work on being more effective in educating students.  This year we went from being a reward school to a celebration school.  All three factors that affect student achievement need to be reflected upon for our school to gain back a reward status.  Are we strong in the five areas Marzano describes for schools?  Are we strong in the three areas for teachers? And how much do we use the three factors for students as excuses for not being a reward school?  I look forward to reading and reflecting more on the ideas that Marzano shares in his book.  I especially am interested in the interventions he mentions early in the first chapter.  Not only does the school I work at have some areas that need to be investigated, but I also have some learning to do in order for the school and my classroom to be a highly effective place to learn and grow. 

Technology Integration

This topic is one that our district has been focused heavily on these past couple years.  We have had many in services and short trainings on integrating the use of ipads, tablets, web tools, etc...into our daily classroom.  Last spring we created lessons using the SAMR Model.  We have moved and will continue to move to a one on one pupil to device based technology plan.  Striving to integrate technology into the day in the life of a student is happening no matter what apprehensions we have as teachers.  The 21st Century classroom is here and I need to move into this type of learning.  Some of my apprehensions revolve around teaching small groups of students for 20 minutes.  My integration is going to have to look a bit different due to the time element.  So far I am sitting at the substitution phase of SAMR.  I just received 3 Ipads last year, not enough for each student.  Students have to share which will lend itself nice to collaboration.  Yet, the students want their own to use and sometimes show challenging behavior when they have to share.  When I have engaged them with the ipads they are absolutely glued to the screen.  They love the ability to move freely navigating the Ipads.  I have noticed some of them talking to one another about where they are and I have noticed how they help each other out when they don't know how to do something on the Ipads..  I am going to be planning a Techno-Read month for our Adventure Read after school program next week.  Classroom teachers have some great ideas on how to use technology to move into modification and redefinition.  One teacher knows a lot about Animoto so we will be planning comprehension around the making of videos.  I look forward to learning from them so I can best integrate the practices into my small groups.

Fall Conference Reflection

On Sunday, I was most inspired and enthused by the literacy discussion my group had in the morning.  The articles focused on ideas for classroom integration across the content, ideas for interventions, and the importance of creating a literacy influenced classroom environment.  A couple new ideas I found helpful that were shared were to have student sharing times following guided reading groups and an inner and outer circle sharing of story comprehension.  I am going to be trying these out when our after school Adventure Reading Club starts in November. 

The Lasallian principles that we have discovered so far in our learning community were clearly present at the fall conference.  These three conepts are:

Associtation - This concept was evident by bringing people together to collaborate around a specific goal or concept and to co-construct learning.

Generativity -  During our small group meetings, we were building the capacity of each person to contribute to a collaborative community by showing care and appreciation for the ongoing sharing of each member.

Adaptation - Using the 21st Century skills of collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and communication, the groups were undergoing authentic learning from one another.