My summer externship has been an eye-opening experience on a few levels. Working with DPI has taught me a lot about how our education system is organized and how it functions.  I’ve made a lot of contacts that I am sure will serve as excellent resources for my instruction and my curriculum heading into the new school year.  I feel empowered, as a classroom teacher, to reach out to these people when I need help and to share with these people when I feel like I have an idea and want my voice heard.  I’m sure that this will ultimately have a positive impact on my classroom curriculum.

More obviously, the work my fellow Fellows and I have done on our project, Making Math Count, will connect to my curriculum in that it will change the way that I plan for and execute math instruction every day.  I’ve learned about an assessment program for developing number concepts in the early grades called Assessing Math Concepts (AMC) by Kathy Richardson.  My first task for my summer externship was to attend an AMC training for Orange County Schools.  At the training I immediately realized that the research and method behind AMC was exactly what was missing from my classroom.  AMC lays the foundation for number concepts for young students and helps the teacher to meet the student, instructionally, exactly where he or she is.  As I was learning about AMC, I kept thinking back to my class from this year.  I had a group of girls that really struggled with math all year.  They were able to move through the procedures that would get them correct answers, but I knew that they weren’t connecting these procedures with the basic math concepts that they should have already known.  They were able to give the “illusion of learning” because they were able to navigate the mathematics topics well enough to find correct answers.  Looking back, I know that all the extra practice and guided math groups I was doing with these girls were not nearly as effective as I’d hoped they had been because I was not going far enough back.  I didn’t have the knowledge of the Critical Learning Phases that these girls had mastered and what they were missing in order to tailor my instruction accordingly.  This year I won’t make the same mistakes.  Between the experience in my summer externship, my relationship with my mentor, and what I’ve learned from my fellow Fellows (who are both phenomenal teachers) I feel certain that my students will receive more thorough and more differentiated instruction in mathematics.  They will ultimately be better prepared to take on the challenges of upper elementary topics in years to come.