Summarizing the first three days

At Wayne Memorial High School, where I will be student teaching for the 2009-2010 school year, teachers and administrators will work to implement Writing Across the Curriculum in hopes of improving the writing abilities and overall academic achievement of students at the school. Writing Across the Curriculum, in short, is based on the idea that writing summaries of course content helps students to learn and understand key concepts. This is done in every subject matter. Here is more information about WAC:  

http://wac.colostate.edu/intro/ 

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/WAC/ 

A good summary here: 

http://712educators.about.com/cs/writingresources/a/writing.htm   

To sum up WAC in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche (I believe, according to a college philosophy professor of mine, although I could not find it anywhere on the WWW): "One does not know what one has not writ."   

So, in the interest of demonstrating this technique (as I believe in leading by example), here is a short summary of days 1, 2, and 3 of professional development and in-service at WMHS according to this pre-service teacher:   

Day 1 (Sept. 1, 2009): 

I arrived at 7 a.m. to meet one of my two mentor teachers, Amy Story, in the office to get a parking pass for my car. We went up to her classroom, she showed me around a little. I met a number of people, including the principal, Valerie Orr, two assistant principals and several teachers. At 8 a.m. the day began with a discussion of discipline and a presentation by Chris McEvoy from Wayne RESA (Regional Educational Service Agency) about how to institute a plan called Positive Behavior Support, which he likened to a public health approach to improving student behavior. For example, public health programs put up signs in bathrooms telling people to wash their hands and how to do it. Similarly, this program aims to show teachers and administrators how to promote positive behavior in students, and provides public instructions via signs and posters for students about expected behaviors.    

The presentation was followed by a break and I went and saw my other mentor teacher's room, Heather Koch. After the break there were a number of announcements and "housekeeping" items. Then we broke for lunch. I attended a meeting with the members of the Non-Fiction Writing Across the Curriculum committee, of which Heather is a part, in preparation for a presentation the next day. Then I got to meet many teachers in the English department in the staff room during lunch and spent most of the rest of the day helping Amy set up her classroom. At the end of the day I went to a curriculum meeting with the English teachers, then fellow MAC program English student teacher Sara Staten and I left to make our class at UM at 4 p.m.  

Day 2 (Sept. 2, 2009):  

I arrived just as the presentations were starting at 8 a.m. This was called “Brutal Reality,” a review of WMHS’s MME test scores for the previous year. The data was not encouraging. Test scores have not improved over the last few years, and last year was the second year that Wayne did not make AYP. The discussion focused on strategies. How can we change this? There was a review of the strategies employed the previous year. Some of this is difficult for me to summarize since the material was so new to me (I have many acronyms to learn), but as I understand (and learned more about the subsequent day), last year content teams met weekly to work on: power standards, common formative assessments, goals, and schedules for implementation. The school has intervention strategies in place to intervene on at-risk students, one of which is a mentoring program. Many teachers mentor one or two students. It sounds like a great program that I would be interested in learning more about. Amy encouraged me later to take be a mentor to a student, which I will likely do.   

There also was discussion of 90/90/90 schools. We broke into groups of five and read excerpts from a research essay about these schools, which have more than 90 percent of students eligible for free or reduced lunch, 90 percent of the students are from ethnic minorities, and 90 percent of the students met or achieved high academic standards. Each of us took notes on what we read, then summarized it in 30 words or less. This reminded me of some of the group exercises we had done in class over the summer – social constructivism: we all took a portion of the essay, read it for understanding, then shared with the group to form a collective understanding of the main ideas. (This also reminded me of writing briefs from press releases at the newspaper.)   

After the break a presentation from the Non-fiction WAC committee followed one about the WMHS writing scores on the MME (Michigan Merit Examination). We did another exercise where we read an essay called “Write More, Grade Less” by Mike Schmoker and took notes using the Cornell method – students fold a piece of paper to make a column along the left side, about one-third of the paper, then take notes on the other, larger side. After taking notes, they go through and write down key concepts on the left side, which later serves as a study guide, a useful and structured way to review notes.   

During the lunch break I got a chance to meet with Heather, then I ate my lunch in the staff room again and helped Amy some more with classroom set-up (Heather had lunch with her mom and two young children, who I also got to meet). At about 3:15 p.m. I was off to class again at UM, where I got to meet my field instructor, Alison Tan, and another English field instructor, Leon Birdyshaw. Alison and Leon compliment other. Alison is a doctoral candidate in education. She shows how to engage thoughtful theories of best practice. Leon is a veteran teacher who gives practical advice based on practice that works, humorously delivered using sports metaphors.   

Day 3 (Sept. 3, 2009): 

I attended a meeting in the senior center at the Wayne/Westland School District community complex with all the high school teachers in the district. Dr. Deborah Wahlstrom gave a presentation called “Don’t Let the Foundation Slip.” It was about aligning grade level expectations with curriculum. The idea is that assessments must accurately measure learning. If you set the bar too low, students may do well on your assessments, but they may not fare well on state assessments that measure their grade-level knowledge.   

After lunch at Panera in the Westland Mall with the English department, where I ate a note-worthy Mediterranean veggie sandwich that I would highly recommend (cilantro hummus, so delicious!), the Wayne/Westland teachers gathered with their content area colleagues to work on aligning curriculum to standards and “unpack” previously established power standards. Here I participated in a meeting of a Professional Learning Committee composed of 10th grade English teachers and sat awed at the amount of professional teacher knowledge to which I was exposed.   

All of the things we MACers learned this summer about what teachers do and how they do it were discussed in this meeting. To quote Pat, I truly felt like I was learning “on the shoulders of giants.” The teachers talked about Bloom’s taxonomy (if not explicitly, then intuitively). The meeting focused mainly on employing WAC: where and when to use non-fiction writing assignments to promote and assess student understanding and comprehension. Many ideas were passed around, but I was most reminded of what Eugenie did in our 649 class. To get us prepared to work on our culminating papers for that class, she asked us periodically to update her on our progress using the discussion component of ctools. First we wrote about the broad paper topic, then we gave a list of resources, followed by a list of problems the educational reform movement (what are papers are about) addresses, then a list of stakeholders in the reform movement, and finally to provide empirical evidence of the effect of the educational reform. If we put these things together, we will have a 5-7 page paper.   

In a similar way, the 10th grade English teachers talked about using this technique to give periodic short assignments to students to assess their learning of material being taught. I was thinking, and I think this was the idea of the essay we took notes on using the Cornell method (see Day 2 above), that we could do with our high school students something similar to what Eugenie did with us. Periodically assign writing assignments based on topical unit material that would ultimately culminate in a longer paper at the end of the unit. It would be a way to gauge the kids’ learning of the material as we go, as well as guide their understanding and ultimate grasp of key concepts of the unit in the end.   

To me, after all the learning from this summer, attending the three days of meetings, professional development and quality time with my mentor teachers, I’m feeling a pretty good level of synchronicity. I hope that comes across to whoever reads this, too, because I suppose you could say this also serves as some kind of assessment tool for me as a student teacher. And now it’s on to more learning, teaching, and assessing (that sounds vaguely reminiscent of Anderson & Krathwohl… oh my!!!).