I am, by nature, an introvert. I’m not a big talker or sharer–I can, and I do, and so many people mistake me for a social butterfly. But by nature, I’m an introvert.  So, sitting down to a computer and writing my thoughts for someone else to read never did strike me as my idea of a good time.

What I discovered is that I did get some clarity and focus out of blogging. Taking a jumble of thoughts and experiences and having to respond to a prompt and put a reflection on a page in a way that others can understand it forces me to be articulate. Although I think the most useful reflections on my fellowship, good teaching, and innovation came in the form of Fellow conversations at breakfast and dinner tables, it was good to have another forum.

In the future, I don’t think I’ll continue to blog about teaching or in general. Not for an audience, necessarily. I like the idea of putting down my own thoughts, perhaps by journaling, but I don’t think I’ll be consistent with it. I do think I can use technology to archive some of my best lessons and student work, and that may be a worthwhile goal.

Now that my KFP year is coming to a close, I’d like to revisit a few of my thoughts from June 27, 2013, ten months ago.

In my Kenan fellowship, I hope to gain friendships. 

I have been so privileged to be part of a group of such wonderful people. After my Home Base peers and I presented at our final conference, we stuck around for quite some time chatting about our projects, our personal lives, and giving input on a Fellows’ daughter’s wedding dress choice. Although we’re spread out across the state, I very much value their expertise and have already called on them in times of confusion, exasperation, or need of support.

I hope to gain cutting edge knowledge and skills.

Definitely! From my experience exploring assessment options in Home Base to trying out the applications and techniques I learned about in KFP PD, I am a lot more likely to dive right in and try new things. I find myself tweaking little things here and there–reviewing an assessment to check for rigor and finding that I need to butcher it (more often than I care to admit), or planning to have students post QR codes by family photographs that link to a descriptive paragraph. I’m also less stubborn. Previously, I never would have flipped a classroom. It just doesn’t fit my personality. But I’ve tried a few lessons and see the worth in it. I know that not only is it possible to innovate, but that I’m willing to. I’ve found ways to use BlendSpace (previously EdCanvas) and PhotoPeach just because I saw them in action in Ed Talks and want to know how my kids will react to them.  I also pass on what I learn. An upper-grade composition teacher incorporated infographics into a lesson on persuasive writing from a Kenan PD day. A lower-grade teacher gave a benchmark on Home Base with the knowledge I gained in my project on creating and administering assessments through the Student Portal. Being on the forefront of the Home Base roll-out was helpful in a single-school LEA. Sometimes we don’t feel ‘in the loop’, so it was great to be aware of features changing dates.

I hope to learn how to advocate for myself, my school and my students. 

Advocating for my students and school was never hard, but now I have more to lobby for. For instance, seeing how much of a tech deficit we have stacked against the number of opportunities for technology to be incorporated, I’ve begun discussions with our IT Coordinator and administration to consider a Bring Your Own Device policy. I’m not certain it will come to fruition, but I’m certain it’s important to try, and I have as evidence that it can work the testimonies of Kenan Fellows who currently or previously worked in schools with similar policies.

Advocating for myself is a bit tougher.  I still feel incredibly small. Even after the third PD day meeting with Eric Guckian and Congressman Price, it’s tough to believe that teachers can affect change in their own field in North Carolina. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be blocked out of a career that I love simply because I can’t afford it anymore. As time goes by and conditions don’t change, that reality becomes increasingly likely.

But at the very basest, I hope to find the best lesson plan for day one in a kindergarten Spanish classroom.

Kindergarten students can now greet someone in Spanish, say their name, count to 20, identify 11 colors, name 6 family members, describe their outfits, sing the seasons, and much more. Some lessons ideas I got from uploading resources to Home Base (like the song “Vengan a Ver mi Granja” to learn animals), and some I picked up from colleagues (like stuffing a tied-off glove for students to ‘shake hands’ with as they practice meeting a new person in Spanish).

As a charter school teacher, I feel a bit isolated from public schools and the decisions that affect us all.  It’s a very different feel from my years in public schools, and I wanted to feel ”tuned in” again. 

I definitely feel tuned in again. I know teachers of many disciplines in my own county, and across the state. I’ve used Kenan Fellows as liaisons to collaborate with Spanish teachers in other schools, so I don’t feel as isolated. Seeing the loss of good teachers from the state and hearing of the pressure I feel echoed by such talented individuals has made me feel part of a movement, and rallied me to use my voice as a teacher. Knowing the dedication that a Fellow has for his or her work amplifies the motivation that is already fueled by co-workers, students and their families and spurs me on. I will miss our gatherings and will be wondering what next year’s KFs are learning at NCCAT and how their externships are going, but I think the skills and mindsets I’ve acquired will carry on.

I’ll try to address both prongs of my work in this post:

1. Researching, evaluating and tagging Open Educational Resources into Home Base

2. Coordinating with DPI, presenting at conferences and creating the items featured here

1. Researching resources was a very time-consuming process. At first I loved looking for standards-aligned resources that facilitated deeper learning. Soon, it devolved into tedium. Most resources had to be passed over for one reason or another–they required a log-in, they had an ad for an M.Ed. program on the side, they didn’t give explicit directions on how to differentiate. It makes sense that it became arduous. Truly choosing a quality resource from the internet takes a lot of time and evaluation.

This experience has made me more cautious about the resources I borrow from others, and the resources that I create. Even for something as simple as a picture, I now must think through all its qualities and abilities before committing to it. I can only hope that going forward, some of the resources I’ve tagged save a teacher an hour of planning, inspire a lesson or a unit, or become the sought-after puzzle piece to a lesson to make it truly successful or memorable.

2. Partnering with DPI has been a great experience. I have always wondered what went on behind those walls, and I’ve had my assumptions. Now I know how nuanced and complications of what’s passed down from the state. DPI representatives aren’t always in full control of the situation. Many public and private entities affect what is eventually passed down to teachers, but DPI has to be the face of it. I know what it’s like to have to stand in support of something I’m not fully on board with yet and try and support it whole-heartedly–much in the way a teacher stands with administration on school procedures not always for her own beliefs but to present a unified front. While I have been required to delve early on into the features of Home Base as one of its ambassadors, I’ve seen the advantages of ‘early adoption’. The sooner you buck up and try something, the quicker you’ll find a way to make it work for you.

In the future, I hope my findings and presentations will have encouraged people to explore Home Base and see if it works for them before the July 15th Home Base deadline. Much in the same way I don’t care how people vote (although I certainly have my own beliefs) but believe they cannot bemoan their government if they don’t vote, I don’t care whether people opt into Home Base or not as long as they try it out. The vetted resources may not be worth the price tag for school systems, and they may have similar applications that help collect and display student data. A combination of programs may work better for an LEA than the single Pearson package, or Home Base may be the solution to all their problems. It doesn’t matter, as long as teachers try it out for themselves. I know I’ve influenced a history teacher and a curriculum coordinator from the Collaborative Conference on Student Achievement to experiment with creating an assessment in Home Base. I worked with my school’s IT manager to administer one of my assessments on my class of guinea pigs, and now we give at least one of our school’s benchmarks through the system. Hopefully I create more little ripples of influence in encouraging teachers to actively participate in evaluating the system and giving feedback.

I feel like every time I sit down to write my year’s Professional Development Plan for school, I write something about technology. It’s not that I’m incompetent with technology; I feel more comfortable with it than most people. But there’s always room for improvement. So, I’m pleased that so much of my fellowship involved the use of technology.

Over the summer, through my hunt to tag 250 online resources, I needed to multi-task.  I needed to have a PDF file of the NC Summary rubric open by which I judged each resource. I needed to have a temporary excel spreadsheet open when I could paste URLs I wanted to return to and jot some notes. I needed to have tabs open for e-mail so I could ask questions of my team or mentors, for the back-end website I was uploading into, and for more than one resource at a time. Web searches can take you pretty far down the rabbit hole, so I found myself clicking ‘Open in a new tab’ more than anything else. Because I needed to go back and forth between so many different websites and programs, the Lenovo tablet worked great for me. I could write some notes from trainings in the OneNote app, scroll over to the web browser and tag resources, and switch to desktop mode to type in a Microsoft Office application.

My project wasn’t a lesson plan with students as end users; it was almost part-evaluation and part-PR. So, I created videos like this one or this one to answer some questions teachers were asking about how Home Base’s instructional resources were being chosen. I felt compelled to use Animoto, an application we’d exploring during NCCAT, to create an upbeat video in support of Home Base. Sometimes it was tough to cheer on a program that wasn’t being rolled out smoothly in every school, and to have your co-workers mistakenly believe you have some influence in making it better.

My experiences creating PR-style videos and moreover going through the harrowing process of screen-casting enabled me to use my technology in class to flip a class or have absent students review (sorry, that one’s on TeacherTube so it’s kid-friendly).

In my fellowship, I worked with DPI to find, evaluate and upload open educational resources to School Net.  My focus while researching was on elementary Spanish resources, but if I came across a resource that would fit older students, I would tag it as well.

So, I don’t have a single lesson that I implemented.  Rather, I have had the opportunity to incorporate several pieces of my externship into my classes as they become relevant.  I have been able to incorporate lots of practices from my Kenan Fellowship into my classes this year (my personal favorite being the training we received on creating valid assessments), and some really excellent additions have been adapted from resources I found during my externship.

One of my favorite resources is a lesson plan called “Eyewitness”.  It was found on the LEARN NC website and was easily adaptable to all languages.  The lesson allows students to describe people’s physical appearances, and I adapted it to be included in my unit on clothing and shopping by altering the vocabulary requirements.  I like that the activity within the lesson has so many modes of learning-listening, speaking, and to some extent, negotiating meaning.  In the activity, students describe a character to their partner, who acts as a police sketch artist and draws them out in detail.  Students can ask clarifying questions, so the activity becomes interpretive in nature.  Here’s an example:

During the lesson, students were very engaged and interested to see if their sketches matched the describer’s sketch.  I wish I had more time for the lesson (40 minutes is not a lot of time for an activity that varies so much from pair to pair depending on their levels of readiness), so next time I think the lesson should be split.  The preparation portion of the activity can be completed in advance as homework, and I can have some spare characters that I have created in case anyone forgets their homework on that day.

Although we located several lesson plans for School Net, there were many different types of resources.  Interactive web-based activities, images, songs, or video could be the inspiration for a lesson.  I came across this excellent video on Youtube:

Como Hacer un Buen Gazpacho

The video is of a Spanish-speaking woman from Spain narrating her actions as she makes a tomato-based soup to be served cold.  My students’ materials and resources don’t often include native speakers from Spain, so I think the video gave excellent exposure to an unfamiliar accent.  Although I tagged this video and uploaded it to School Net early on in my search, the tagging and uploading of YouTube videos was discouraged later in the process by our mentors, which I disagree with –most teachers know how to use, and do use, YouTube appropriately in their classrooms. But when uploading resources, it is important to be able to cite all owners and creators of materials for copyright purposes.

The video inspired a lesson called “Catadores”, or “Taste-Testers”, in which students got to try three types of street food popular in Spanish-speaking countries and react to those foods.  Student helpers served chicharrones (fried pork pieces), gazpacho, and frutas con chile en polvo (fruit with lime juice and chili powder).  Students reacted to the foods by first holding up color-coded sheets of paper with appropriate adjectives in the target language.  Then, they responded in writing to a few questions about each food.  Finally, they chose one of the street foods to write a review on in the target language.  When they tried gazpacho, the students did a listening activity with the YouTube video mentioned above.

Although the nature of my fellowship and externship did not allow for much depth within one particular lesson, I am starting to appreciate the fact that I have found so many lessons and inspirations for lessons that are now just a few short clicks away from any NC teacher who chooses to peruse School Net.

The Fellow/Mentor parternship within the Kenan program is extremely beneficial for all parties.  Most partnerships are within STEM fields, since this is the orginal focus of the Kenan Fellows Program.  My partnership was with NC DPI, so it’s a little different, but the benefits are the same.

As fellows, we gain skills and connections from our partnerships.  Fellows are participating in new research that they can use in their lessons, and learning new techniques that they can pass on to students, such as propagation of venus fly traps in one partnership.  Having fellows exposed to this research and techniques puts them on the cutting edge as teachers– having current knowledge about a field from real-life experiences instead of text books will increase the enthusiasm and the accuracy of their teaching.  Having students exposed to the products, practices, and processes of each of these fellowships is so enlightening.  Having students design the labels for muscadine grape smoothies, for example, could spark a kid’s interest in marketing, graphic design, or sustainable agriculture.  In non-STEM partnerships, such as with DPI, fellows have the opportunity of a connection at the state level.  All teachers are affected by state mandates.  Fellows get to have an effect on the mandates themselves through the projects and partnerships they create.

It’s not just teachers and students that benefit.  There are advantages for the businesses and institutions that are our partners.  Students are their future work force.  The work that fellows are doing can push a student in a certain direction within that work force, either by simply exposing them to a growing field they hadn’t heard of, or by allowing them hands-on experiences that they can build on in the future.  Kenan Fellow lessons can put a student on the road to biotechnology or microbiological research.  What could have easily been a ‘Careers in Sciences’ textbook sidebar with an outdated photograph, uninteresting or unattainable for many students, can now be a student’s reality for that day or that unit.

It’s mutually beneficial for North Carolina institutes and businesses to have their knowledge and skills imparted upon North Carolina students who will soon become our working citizens.  Teachers and school administrators often push for more parent involvement.  This gives a support structure for the present–who’s monitoring homework at home, who’s helping younger students with time management, who’s instilling values and consequences.  Kenan parternships create a support structure for these students’ and our state’s future– who those students will be in ten years, and helping NC fill the need for a skilled workforce with an ever-growing STEM inclination.

Having completed all three professional development sessions of my Kenan Fellows program, I feel like I have grown in two major arenas: advocacy and improvement.  I know that it sounds odd to say that I’ve improved in improvement, so I’ll start there.

I entered education through Teach for America, a program that I have mixed feelings about some days, but when it comes down to it, prepared me very well for the challenges of the classroom.  I still think in terms of TFA’s Teaching as Leadership rubric that forms the basis of their training, one category of which is ”Continuously Improving Effectiveness”.  It was the rubric row I always scored low on, because as a first year teacher in the 5th lowest performing middle school in NC, I was always trying to keep my head above water.  Once I broke the surface, I stayed at about the same level, comfortably adequate.  I think several of the Kenan PD sessions inspired me to improve my effectiveness and do so with quickness.  Justin Osterstrom and Paul Cancellieri’s presentation on data literacy and valid assessments encouraged me to pore over all my summative tests and revise them.  Within two weeks of Vance Kite’s infographics session, I shared with a coworker what I learned and he implemented it in a project with his own students.  I shared what I learned about augmented reality apps with a charter school teacher I met at FLANC (the Foreign Language Association of NC) conference and we talked about how even elementary students could use the technology with low-level speaking skills in world language classes.  Admittedly, for the past 3 years or so I’ve been coasting as an educator, and now it’s nice to feel a sense of urgency–to feel that right this second there’s technology being developed that I can use in my classroom within the week to engage my students, that one county over is someone who has an innovative idea about how to assess my students and all I’ve got to do is ask.

I think the other way in which I’ve grown is advocacy.  I always found policy foggy and dull when I started teaching–I didn’t know who was making the laws that affected me, and I sort of didn’t care because I felt so detached and helpless.  I felt like DPI, school boards and legislators were a million miles away and unreachable, so I just kept my head down and did my job.  When Representative David Price, Education Advisor Eric Guckian and J. B. Buxton spoke, (all very different perspectives), I was riveted.  During the surprise fire drill, I had an unexpected opportunity to chat with Rebecca Hite about advocacy in general and advocacy possibilities for world language teachers.  I now feel like I have a voice, and that the people who make the laws that affect me aren’t a million miles away anymore.  I no longer feel like I have to keep my head down and do my job, because I feel like it’s my job to keep my head up and keep speaking for the future of my students, some of whom want to be teachers when they grow up.

I am proud to have had my experiences with the Kenan Fellows program.  It is exciting to invite my DPI mentors into my classroom to see a lesson and have them comment on all the formative assessment they see.  It’s encouraging to challenge my administration’s no electronics policy in lobbying for a possible bring-your-own-device policy that I think will benefit my students.  It’s energizing to feel that what I’ve gained are the mindset and the spark to drive forward again as an educator.

There is a big part of me that fully understands that social media is the way of the future.  There is a small part of me that participates in it–I have a Facebook page that I mostly use for displaying pictures of my dog–but largely I communicate with people that I know in person or by telephone, and by good old letters and Forever stamps if they’re far away.  I don’t tweet or have a Tumblr page or use Vine or Snapchat, but I understand why children would.  After all, I sat up all night on AOL Instant Messenger in middle school talking to friends that I easily could have called or seen in person.  And all of me understands that you should meet kids where they are.

So, I can get behind Voicethread and Edmodo.  I like the idea of children being able to comment on others’ work and collaborate.  Even if you don’t have a classroom you can have a digital gallery walk.  Students spend a lot of time communicating in short spurts for the whole world to see and ”liking” images and statuses of their peers, so it makes a lot of sense to mimic that activity to engage them.  I also love the idea of giving students time and space to answer.  If you pose a question in an online forum as opposed to live in the classroom, your introverts are more likely to answer.  I am an introvert, and you couldn’t have gotten me to speak up in any class in high school without a crowbar, but I made required online contributions in college without much coercion because like lots of quiet kids, I appreciated the time to compose my thoughts and the freedom from an in-person audience.

But I also understand why teachers and administrators have reason to be cautious about social media in the classroom.  Social media in the real world can breed a mess of ills–with all the news about cyber-bullying, it’s hard to ignore.  Even with sites like Voicethread, students have to be given very clear expectations about their interactions and posts, and teachers must monitor constantly.   The good news is that most sites for education allow moderators to delete posts, but it’s impossible to moderate 24/7.

Ultimately, I think that given appropriate norms and modeling, students will interact positively, but there is always the possibility that students will say something off-topic, inappropriate, or hurtful.

During my Kenan Fellowship, the greatest thing I’ve learned isn’t a single fact or skill.  The greatest thing I’ve learned is that NC has a community of truly excellent educators willing to collaborate.  I have encountered these educators through the Kenan Fellows program, through my Home Base group within the program, through DPI and in conferences which I have attended to present for DPI.

World language and fine arts teachers at the middle and elementary school level are often isolated within their schools.  Whether your subject holds district-wide departmental meetings or professional learning communities varies by district, so you may be on your own for the majority of the time.  Years of being in this environment has pushed me to be largely self-sufficient, which is a good thing, but also has its downside.

Through my externship, I have encountered generosity of spirit both in educators in NC and in the wealth of teacher-created resources shared online that I have evaluated and tagged for Home Base.  I am impressed with the amount of time and effort that teachers put in to give all students a better education: hours and hours formatting and uploading lesson plans to web pages, creating videos to explain content, answering e-mails from colleagues within the profession, and just sitting down to chat and share ideas.

The most important thing that I have learned is that, in a state in which it becomes more difficult to teach every day and in which the future of education hangs so delicately in the balance between left and right, I am not alone.  Whether local, regional, state, or virtual, there are communities of educators sharing and generating new ideas to make teachers’ and students’ experiences richer.

The first day of school for most teachers was Monday, August 26th.  My first day was more than a month ago.  I teach on a modified year-round schedule.  Unfortunately, the transition from middle to elementary/middle has required a great deal of my time in creating new materials and planning new lessons.  It has been making my fellowship difficult, as when I would normally sit down to tag resources, I now have to cut out manipulatives for K-2 and 3-5.

The good news is that as I am finding and tagging resources online, I have the opportunity to implement them in the classroom.  Thus far, I haven’t implemented a full item or lesson that I have tagged into my classroom, but I have incorporated several pieces of lessons and items.

From lesson plans including puppetry, I have introduced into my lower level classrooms ‘Miguel la Mano’, a decorated rubber glove, stuffed with poly-fill and tied off with string.  Miguel lets students introduce themselves to him over and over, and he’s a lot less intimidating than towering, fast-talking Ms. B.  From the video series ‘SALSA’ created by Georgia Public Broadcasting, I’ve internalized a mindset that helps students acquire and retain vocabulary: theatricality and repetition.  From an elementary curriculum project in a university education program, I’ve incorporated several silly songs that I never would have had the whimsy to invent nor the guts to try myself if they hadn’t been previously tested.

Having not taught anyone younger than 11 years old in my life, this fellowship is like an exercise in pedagogy.  What I never learned in professional development that addressed the middle school learner, I am now gleaning through the lesson plans and instructional items of other teachers.  These skills and mindsets are being transferred to my teaching in real time, and it’s incredibly formative and exciting.