Climbing the Teacher Continuum

I am in a somewhat exciting role at my school in which I get to see every student.  Throughout a week this year, I will get to visit each class at each grade level.  Since my lab is too small for an entire class to be in with proper social distancing, I will be visiting classes and working from a cart.  This isn’t ideal, but I do love the fact that I get to create such a small footprint in what we sometimes forget is a student, not a teacher space.  Removing a teacher’s desk is a great way to remove the hierarchy created by a teacher’s space and a student’s space and in essence gives every student a front row seat (Sutor, 2015).  I am excited to see and feel how this works with differing grade levels and students.  

However, for this post I wanted to think about the third grade classes that I will be seeing this year.  I decided to think about this grade specifically because I know that the students in that grade are a very diverse group.  There are several levels of mastery in the grade and at least a few students that fall into the category of high need or gifted.  With such a wide range it will be a challenge to make sure that my lessons and units are differentiated and personalized.  What is my role in providing personalized learning to this grade level using Colorado science standards and technology standards from ISTE?

To answer that I must know where I am on the continuum of educators engaged in personalized learning.  Zmuda and Thompson (2018) lay out four categories of educators within a personalized learning system in their free ebook How to Leverage Personalized Learning in the Classroom that are helpful in defining where I am at, and where I need to go.  The four categories shown in the graphic below are (a) Lecturer, (b) Instructor, (c) Facilitator, and finally (d) Coach.   

I believe that I am in the instructor tier at this moment.  I often use a mini lesson and then let students do independent practice in the form of a problem or project based learning activity.  This is a sufficient place to be, but I would like to move up at least one step this year by striving to become a facilitator.  Moving up these steps isn’t an overnight process and teachers need to make purposeful, scaffolded changes to move upward (Zmuda & Thompson, 2018).  If by the end of the school year, students have input into instruction and have a wider range of choice in their learning with me, I would count that as a solid win.

One way to accomplish this shift from instructor to facilitator is to incorporate a rotation model into my teaching (Zmuda & Thompson, 2018).  This is fantastic to hear since I have been planning on using a mix between a lab rotation where students would rotation to stations in set order and an individual rotation where they would have more choice in the order they complete a playlist of stations (Blended Learning Universe, n.d.).  My goal is to start with more of a lab rotation model, providing rotations that the third graders will complete in order.  Since I have to be wary of students using shared materials or interacting in groups that are not socially distanced, I believe that I can do this through the use of Google Classroom and hyperdocs or student playlists.  As third grade students, they may have had some choice in their primary grades, but not as much as opening the gates on individual rotations for the first part of the school year.  As they become more comfortable and as I scaffold learning around how to use the rotations, I can transition the students to a more individual rotation.  This can include choice in what stations they do and even creation of stations as well. 

Part of this model will be gathering data on students to group them appropriately surrounding content.  My place in this will be of utmost importance.  I will need to collect data about each student and will be able to do this in three important ways.  The first is that I will need to communicate with the classroom teacher.  This sounds like a no-brainer, but it is important to note.  It will be important to get IEP and testing information from teachers as well as any narrative information about how students are doing in and outside of school.  Knowing that a student is having a bad day because of a quick check-in with a teacher will be invaluable and ultimately my responsibility to ask the teacher.  I will also need to gather informal data based on things like entrance and exit tickets.  I will be giving a student survey within the first week to learn about student interests as well.  In a more formal way I can collect data from project rubrics and from formal pre-assessments as Zmuda and Thompson (2018) suggest.

I am excited to work with this interesting and diverse set of third graders this year.  As they are transitioning from a primary grade and getting more independence, I hope to use choice and involvement in content creation to reinforce a positive experience of it.  As their independence and involvement grows I will also be taking steps to become a true facilitator for my students. 

References

Blended Learning Universe. (n.d.). Blended learning: What is blended learning? Retrieved from https://www.blendedlearning.org/models/#stat

Sutor, C. (2015, January 30). The Rise Of The Student Footprint In 21st Century Learning Environments [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.integrusarch.com/2015/01/30/rise-student-footprint-21st-century-learning-environments/ 

Zmuda, A., & Thompson, J. (2018). How to Leverage Personalized Learning in the Classroom. Retrieved from https://info.freshgrade.com/hubfs/eBooks_and_Whitepapers/FG-PL-PDF-1.5.pdf?hsCtaTracking=bed942d8-65b8-4d86-9b16-4f7edbbec13d|c56989c4-019b-4ea5-aef7-c6effc4accf9