March Madness: Reflective, Competitive PD

What is March Madness PD?

My school's PD committee rolled out a new competition yesterday that involves departments squaring off in brackets against each other every week of March. Each department tries to get points based on certain reflective activities. 1 point for a journal entry, 5 points for a 15 minute peer observation with reflection, and 5 points for a personal video reflection. Instead of doing it as an interactive notebook and suffering through writing journal entries by hand (My handwriting is atrocious if I don't go slowly, and our "PD coach" aka partner from another department, has to submit the points for us. So I'd be subjecting my coworker to the fun game we teachers often have to play: guess what the heck this says!) I will be doing it blog form.

Week 1:Science vs. ELA

Entry 1: Our first entry is supposed to be a reflection of the quotation to the right, so batter up! (I know March Madness is basketball, not baseball, but Spring Training just started so...Go Red Sox!)

To me, what is reflection looks very different for a novice teacher compared to an experienced one. I think the uncertainty of the first year, where you just sort of assume that if the kids don't get something, it is probably something wrong with the lesson, is a good mentality for a teacher to have (Note: that same mentality coming from outside - media, parents, politicians, admin - is actually counterproductive to a teacher because it is fairly disheartening). It makes it where that reflection of "how can I make this better/more effective/stick more" and I would be back to the drawing board and develop different strategies. I think because I had to create whole new lessons to "fix" unsuccessful lessons, that reflection component was now more apparent. I learned how to be a better teacher by my reflection.

For experienced teachers, we are literally reflecting as we go, adapting as we see the misconceptions and struggles of our classes. My lesson first period can look markedly different from my lesson three classes from then. We are reflecting over lunch, reflecting as we grade something and see the same errors happening again and again. Anyone who hand grades a multiple choice assignment is probably getting more from it than someone who is running a scantron. Do a hand done and after several students have missed a question, the teacher is reaching for the test to figure out if she coded the answer incorrectly or if there was something in the question or distractor that was unfair. By the end of hand-grading, I am already hatching plans to help my students succeed next time.

Entry 2: although I love how tech provides opportunities to create and express, I feel a marked difference when I physically start moving manipulatives around. As I was reflecting on my digital portfolio, I quickly realized organizing and grouping ideas on a piece of paper is pretty onerous. So I decided to instead put each thing on a post-it so I could move things around. It wasn't 5 post-it's in when I suddenly had a couple grouping ideas. The power of manipulatives to help catagorize can not be understated. It makes me think about how I can provide more opportunities for my students to organize their own ideas.

Entry 3: