Access
Students and their families have been exposed to people, programs, resources, and connections that can open doors for them, and they are able to navigate and access those opportunities.
Student growth is the reason why we’re all here. At the end of the day, the ideal outcome is to have a class full of high achieving students, but a big factor is the journey that the students take to get there. Along the way to student success, and dramatic academic growth, students learn skills and mindsets that set them up for that success. The cornerstone of this journey lies in access. Access to opportunity and information, is the foundation upon which students and families can build the skills to succeed later in life and open the necessary doors along the way. In order to help students and families navigate and access opportunities, they need to be introduced to the concepts early and practice with them. At Wheeler Middle School, through our partnership with the military because of our 99% military dependent population, we are fortunate enough to have a variety of resources available for our students. I have made it my mission to take advantage of these resources, and to provide access to my students and help them to navigate available resources, and how to seek out and take advantage of these resources themselves. Our campus is equipped with full sets of technology for teachers to reserve for student use, our military students have access to free online tutoring funded by the Department of Defense, and we have personnel on campus who are there to emotionally support the students and help prevent dangerous behavior; these are all opportunities that I strive to integrate into my lessons and information presentation so that my students can be successful both academically and emotionally.
Technology is the future, there’s no question about that. Coming into this year, I found that I had a very diverse spread of technology skills amongst my students. Some of them came in with a 30-40 wpm typing speed and full understanding of how software and basic browsers work, and others didn’t know what a URL was, or how to put their hands on a keyboard. Last year at Wheeler, I had access to a laptop cart with 30 MacBook Pros that I shared with my team teacher, and I was able to have almost every social studies lesson integrate technology and Google Apps for Education. Because of this, my students learned technology skills early in the year, and had a lot of time to practice. This year, however, I don’t have a resident laptop cart and instead reserve and check out technology from the Information Resource Center (IRC), which is essentially our library, and often have to either make my case for how I’m going to use my technology, or try and reserve it far ahead of time so that I don’t have to compete with another teacher in order to get it. Despite these difficulties in acquiring the access to technology, when I do have the opportunities to use laptops in my classroom, I take full advantage of it, practicing necessary technological skills such as how to search for information in a search engine, and introduce my students to new skills and information such as how to effectively gain basic information and research inspiration from wikipedia and even free typing lesson websites.
In my first piece of evidence, I am specifically highlighting my use of technology in my English class while we were studying the Elements of Mythology during our Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief unit. Initially this lesson was planned to be a very basic paper-and-pencil, students work in groups to create a poster, and follow up with a gallery walk to get the information. I took this lesson plan and digitized it to give my students practice with creating presentations, and working in groups with technology. The students still worked in groups to discuss the elements, gist, and theme of the myth that their group was assigned, but each student was required to document and create their own presentation that was to be used for a gallery walk of Google presentations. Because of this high-stakes factor of their presentation was delivering the information to other students, they took special care to make their presentations attractive,informational, and complete. Lesson adaptations like this one are common when I am able to check out technology, and I take full advantage of them whenever I can. Resources like Google, and Google Drive, which are free applications that students can use as long as they have internet connection, can help students who may not have access to resources like Microsoft Office still develop necessary word processing and presentation creation skills. I am in the process of coordinating with another technology savvy teacher at my school to set up a parent workshop where we teach parents the basics of technology so that they can support their students at home, and learn how to take advantage of the available resources. These resources are vital to helping students navigate the technology that they will inevitably encounter throughout their lives, and to set them up for success and growth as 21st century learners.
In addition to providing physical resources for students in the form of access to technology, I also take advantage of available people and programs that my students and parents can use to increase their access and take advantage of opportunities. For my second and third pieces of evidence, I am highlighting the Access and Advocacy Action Plan that I produced during my Johns Hopkins University program. This experience prompted me to explore available resources that can increase my students’ access and advocacy, and to choose one and implement it. For this assignment, I chose to approach an on-campus resource, Mr. Justin, who is a substance abuse prevention counselor. Essentially his job is to help students in middle school better understand the changes that they are experiencing in their lives, from academics, to peer interactions, to family relations, and how to channel negative emotions properly. Mr. Justin is available to meet with any student on campus who has been identified as in need of his services, but is also available for students to schedule meetings if they feel the need. By exposing my students to the knowledge that Mr. Justin is on campus, and that he is available to talk, I was able to increase my students’ access to emotional and academic support from a resource that isn’t connected to the Department of Education. In addition to introducing Mr. Justin to the students, all teachers on campus are able to invite him into our classrooms to give sessions on information about the realities of middle school, and strategies to cope with negative stressors. For my action plan, I planned to have sessions every 2-3 weeks, with student reflections and discussions on implementation of his strategies during the other Wednesdays that he didn’t come in. This resulted in many of my students having a heightened understanding of themselves as middle schoolers, and resulted in a stronger community within my classroom. Students were noticeably more aware of themselves, were able to identify when they were stressed out and needed to talk to get help, and talked to each other when someone was acting inappropriately negative. Access to not only Mr. Justin as a person to talk to, but also to these strategies such as taking a mindful minute to reduce anger or frustration, the psychology behind stress, and being able to talk about being bullied, have helped these students. By introducing students to these resources, I am opening the door for them to understand that it’s okay, if not necessary, to talk about issues to prevent them from manifesting in negative ways. Being emotionally stable and comfortable is imperative in an academic setting to reduce your affective filter and to focus on learning and the path that you are on in life. This resource is invaluable in opening those doors for these students and helping them to navigate this opportunity, and what to look for in future schools to receive the emotional and academic support that they may need.
My fourth and fifth pieces of evidence show an activity that I did with my students to encourage them to put thought into their futures and the path that they are on. At Wheeler Middle School, we emphasize that we want our students to be college and career ready. While we are putting our energy into making sure that they are academically prepared, I believe that there is no time like the present to start getting students to think about what they need to do in order to be successful on the path to higher education. Because of this, my team teacher and I put together a lesson to inform and to guide our students on the first steps that they can take to be ready for college and ready to put together a college app and a college resume. My third piece of evidence, a video of the lesson that I used while giving this information to my students, shows extremely high student engagement and involvement with the materials. The students wanted to learn more about the college experience and how to do it. I found that a lot of the questions and topics that my students wanted to discuss revolved around scholarships and money, which helps give me a foundational understanding of what I can focus on in future lessons; the kids want more information on how to pay for school. In this video you can see the progression of the lesson from information delivery and discussions, to them working on their application. The students had some time in class to do research on what they are interested in, but my focus was in them taking it home to work on it with their parents so that both students and parents could gain an understanding of the process.
For my fifth piece of evidence, I chose samples of students who have a variety of backgrounds and experience with the college process. In the current education climate, the word “college” is thrown around so much that while students might know that they’re going to college, or be able to regurgitate the name of a college, they don’t really know what it takes to get there. In this lesson, we started with a do now, and basic guided notes on a presentation to learn the basics about college. This helped to serve as the foundation for those students who may not have had access to information about college in the past. After this brief introduction was the meat of the lesson. Students were given a list of majors at a community college, and encouraged to research different majors to learn more about what the major was. On pages 4 and 7 you can see the research and application that they did to learn more about these majors. They then researched basic information about what the major is, and what sorts of jobs those majors could be applied to. This process was rewarding in and of itself because they were able to navigate and access the research process for learning more about available majors, and the major-to-career pipeline. After doing the basic research, the students worked on a real-life application to a community college, as well as creating a game plan for what they need to start doing. On pages 5, 6, 8, 9, you can see the applications that the students filled out. While I went through the application at school with them, it was their job to go over the application with their parents to understand what all components were asking. You can see the parents signed the application, and the students were able to correctly fill out the information. According to the Wheeler Middle School School Quality Survey, at our school, the breakdown of parental education is 17% are college graduates, 34.5% have some college 34.4% have a high school degree and 13% have less than a high school degree. This information shows that about 68% of our parents have little to no experience with the college process. By providing these students the opportunity to discuss this with their parents, we are exposing parents to the process early so that they have time to better understand and prepare for future needs of their child. In addition to this, we are working on compiling a college basics packet for parents, going to be continuing our college preparedness lessons to help the students come up with a grade 6-12 game plan. Even after this assignment, students came in saying they were still doing more research about scholarships, majors, college life, and what they can do now to prepare!
My favorite part of this assignment, which shows the students’ ability to navigate and access these opportunities, is found on pages 12-20. On these pages, I have compiled the gameplans of 8 of my students, and what they feel that they need to do in order to get into college. These students read basic information about writing a college resume, getting volunteer experience, and what would contribute to them getting into college. Throughout these responses you see things like “I should start doing volunteer hours for what I am interested in so I can prepare to apply to colleges in the future”, and “I should volunteer for things related to what I want to do in the future… it’ll help me learn and gain experience… good to add on my resume”, or “I can start preparing myself to apply to colleges [by] looking for scholarships to go to a school in the career field [I] want to do”. This shows that from this activity alone, they have started to put thought into how they can better prepare themselves and what they can start doing now. As 6th graders, they are starting to be at the age where they can work with volunteer organizations to start gaining that experience.This whole process as a whole was inspiring and encouraging for the capabilities that these students have to navigate their futures, and that they are capable of putting thought into all actions they are taking in preparation for their future. The fact that their parents were involved, and are going to continue to be involved, is even more inspiring because I know that with more information and resources, these parents can help their students on their respective academic journeys.
Access to opportunity comes in many different forms. Whether it’s through physical access to technology and the opportunity to learn and grow as a 21st century learner, or through the people and programs available to you if you only know where to look, there are resources and opportunities all around, you just have to know where to look. I put energy into personally making sure that my students have the tools and mindsets to be able to get the work and help that they need, and to have those tools stay with my students long after I am done teaching them. As an educator, and a person who is personally invested in the lives of my students, part of the job lies on me to ensure that I am exposing my students to every possible opportunity that I can, but the rest is on them and their parents to carry it throughout the rest of their lives.
Access Evidence 1
Access Evidence 2
Access Evidence 3
Access Evidence 4
Access Evidence 5
Student growth is the reason why we’re all here. At the end of the day, the ideal outcome is to have a class full of high achieving students, but a big factor is the journey that the students take to get there. Along the way to student success, and dramatic academic growth, students learn skills and mindsets that set them up for that success. The cornerstone of this journey lies in access. Access to opportunity and information, is the foundation upon which students and families can build the skills to succeed later in life and open the necessary doors along the way. In order to help students and families navigate and access opportunities, they need to be introduced to the concepts early and practice with them. At Wheeler Middle School, through our partnership with the military because of our 99% military dependent population, we are fortunate enough to have a variety of resources available for our students. I have made it my mission to take advantage of these resources, and to provide access to my students and help them to navigate available resources, and how to seek out and take advantage of these resources themselves. Our campus is equipped with full sets of technology for teachers to reserve for student use, our military students have access to free online tutoring funded by the Department of Defense, and we have personnel on campus who are there to emotionally support the students and help prevent dangerous behavior; these are all opportunities that I strive to integrate into my lessons and information presentation so that my students can be successful both academically and emotionally.
Technology is the future, there’s no question about that. Coming into this year, I found that I had a very diverse spread of technology skills amongst my students. Some of them came in with a 30-40 wpm typing speed and full understanding of how software and basic browsers work, and others didn’t know what a URL was, or how to put their hands on a keyboard. Last year at Wheeler, I had access to a laptop cart with 30 MacBook Pros that I shared with my team teacher, and I was able to have almost every social studies lesson integrate technology and Google Apps for Education. Because of this, my students learned technology skills early in the year, and had a lot of time to practice. This year, however, I don’t have a resident laptop cart and instead reserve and check out technology from the Information Resource Center (IRC), which is essentially our library, and often have to either make my case for how I’m going to use my technology, or try and reserve it far ahead of time so that I don’t have to compete with another teacher in order to get it. Despite these difficulties in acquiring the access to technology, when I do have the opportunities to use laptops in my classroom, I take full advantage of it, practicing necessary technological skills such as how to search for information in a search engine, and introduce my students to new skills and information such as how to effectively gain basic information and research inspiration from wikipedia and even free typing lesson websites.
In my first piece of evidence, I am specifically highlighting my use of technology in my English class while we were studying the Elements of Mythology during our Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief unit. Initially this lesson was planned to be a very basic paper-and-pencil, students work in groups to create a poster, and follow up with a gallery walk to get the information. I took this lesson plan and digitized it to give my students practice with creating presentations, and working in groups with technology. The students still worked in groups to discuss the elements, gist, and theme of the myth that their group was assigned, but each student was required to document and create their own presentation that was to be used for a gallery walk of Google presentations. Because of this high-stakes factor of their presentation was delivering the information to other students, they took special care to make their presentations attractive,informational, and complete. Lesson adaptations like this one are common when I am able to check out technology, and I take full advantage of them whenever I can. Resources like Google, and Google Drive, which are free applications that students can use as long as they have internet connection, can help students who may not have access to resources like Microsoft Office still develop necessary word processing and presentation creation skills. I am in the process of coordinating with another technology savvy teacher at my school to set up a parent workshop where we teach parents the basics of technology so that they can support their students at home, and learn how to take advantage of the available resources. These resources are vital to helping students navigate the technology that they will inevitably encounter throughout their lives, and to set them up for success and growth as 21st century learners.
In addition to providing physical resources for students in the form of access to technology, I also take advantage of available people and programs that my students and parents can use to increase their access and take advantage of opportunities. For my second and third pieces of evidence, I am highlighting the Access and Advocacy Action Plan that I produced during my Johns Hopkins University program. This experience prompted me to explore available resources that can increase my students’ access and advocacy, and to choose one and implement it. For this assignment, I chose to approach an on-campus resource, Mr. Justin, who is a substance abuse prevention counselor. Essentially his job is to help students in middle school better understand the changes that they are experiencing in their lives, from academics, to peer interactions, to family relations, and how to channel negative emotions properly. Mr. Justin is available to meet with any student on campus who has been identified as in need of his services, but is also available for students to schedule meetings if they feel the need. By exposing my students to the knowledge that Mr. Justin is on campus, and that he is available to talk, I was able to increase my students’ access to emotional and academic support from a resource that isn’t connected to the Department of Education. In addition to introducing Mr. Justin to the students, all teachers on campus are able to invite him into our classrooms to give sessions on information about the realities of middle school, and strategies to cope with negative stressors. For my action plan, I planned to have sessions every 2-3 weeks, with student reflections and discussions on implementation of his strategies during the other Wednesdays that he didn’t come in. This resulted in many of my students having a heightened understanding of themselves as middle schoolers, and resulted in a stronger community within my classroom. Students were noticeably more aware of themselves, were able to identify when they were stressed out and needed to talk to get help, and talked to each other when someone was acting inappropriately negative. Access to not only Mr. Justin as a person to talk to, but also to these strategies such as taking a mindful minute to reduce anger or frustration, the psychology behind stress, and being able to talk about being bullied, have helped these students. By introducing students to these resources, I am opening the door for them to understand that it’s okay, if not necessary, to talk about issues to prevent them from manifesting in negative ways. Being emotionally stable and comfortable is imperative in an academic setting to reduce your affective filter and to focus on learning and the path that you are on in life. This resource is invaluable in opening those doors for these students and helping them to navigate this opportunity, and what to look for in future schools to receive the emotional and academic support that they may need.
My fourth and fifth pieces of evidence show an activity that I did with my students to encourage them to put thought into their futures and the path that they are on. At Wheeler Middle School, we emphasize that we want our students to be college and career ready. While we are putting our energy into making sure that they are academically prepared, I believe that there is no time like the present to start getting students to think about what they need to do in order to be successful on the path to higher education. Because of this, my team teacher and I put together a lesson to inform and to guide our students on the first steps that they can take to be ready for college and ready to put together a college app and a college resume. My third piece of evidence, a video of the lesson that I used while giving this information to my students, shows extremely high student engagement and involvement with the materials. The students wanted to learn more about the college experience and how to do it. I found that a lot of the questions and topics that my students wanted to discuss revolved around scholarships and money, which helps give me a foundational understanding of what I can focus on in future lessons; the kids want more information on how to pay for school. In this video you can see the progression of the lesson from information delivery and discussions, to them working on their application. The students had some time in class to do research on what they are interested in, but my focus was in them taking it home to work on it with their parents so that both students and parents could gain an understanding of the process.
For my fifth piece of evidence, I chose samples of students who have a variety of backgrounds and experience with the college process. In the current education climate, the word “college” is thrown around so much that while students might know that they’re going to college, or be able to regurgitate the name of a college, they don’t really know what it takes to get there. In this lesson, we started with a do now, and basic guided notes on a presentation to learn the basics about college. This helped to serve as the foundation for those students who may not have had access to information about college in the past. After this brief introduction was the meat of the lesson. Students were given a list of majors at a community college, and encouraged to research different majors to learn more about what the major was. On pages 4 and 7 you can see the research and application that they did to learn more about these majors. They then researched basic information about what the major is, and what sorts of jobs those majors could be applied to. This process was rewarding in and of itself because they were able to navigate and access the research process for learning more about available majors, and the major-to-career pipeline. After doing the basic research, the students worked on a real-life application to a community college, as well as creating a game plan for what they need to start doing. On pages 5, 6, 8, 9, you can see the applications that the students filled out. While I went through the application at school with them, it was their job to go over the application with their parents to understand what all components were asking. You can see the parents signed the application, and the students were able to correctly fill out the information. According to the Wheeler Middle School School Quality Survey, at our school, the breakdown of parental education is 17% are college graduates, 34.5% have some college 34.4% have a high school degree and 13% have less than a high school degree. This information shows that about 68% of our parents have little to no experience with the college process. By providing these students the opportunity to discuss this with their parents, we are exposing parents to the process early so that they have time to better understand and prepare for future needs of their child. In addition to this, we are working on compiling a college basics packet for parents, going to be continuing our college preparedness lessons to help the students come up with a grade 6-12 game plan. Even after this assignment, students came in saying they were still doing more research about scholarships, majors, college life, and what they can do now to prepare!
My favorite part of this assignment, which shows the students’ ability to navigate and access these opportunities, is found on pages 12-20. On these pages, I have compiled the gameplans of 8 of my students, and what they feel that they need to do in order to get into college. These students read basic information about writing a college resume, getting volunteer experience, and what would contribute to them getting into college. Throughout these responses you see things like “I should start doing volunteer hours for what I am interested in so I can prepare to apply to colleges in the future”, and “I should volunteer for things related to what I want to do in the future… it’ll help me learn and gain experience… good to add on my resume”, or “I can start preparing myself to apply to colleges [by] looking for scholarships to go to a school in the career field [I] want to do”. This shows that from this activity alone, they have started to put thought into how they can better prepare themselves and what they can start doing now. As 6th graders, they are starting to be at the age where they can work with volunteer organizations to start gaining that experience.This whole process as a whole was inspiring and encouraging for the capabilities that these students have to navigate their futures, and that they are capable of putting thought into all actions they are taking in preparation for their future. The fact that their parents were involved, and are going to continue to be involved, is even more inspiring because I know that with more information and resources, these parents can help their students on their respective academic journeys.
Access to opportunity comes in many different forms. Whether it’s through physical access to technology and the opportunity to learn and grow as a 21st century learner, or through the people and programs available to you if you only know where to look, there are resources and opportunities all around, you just have to know where to look. I put energy into personally making sure that my students have the tools and mindsets to be able to get the work and help that they need, and to have those tools stay with my students long after I am done teaching them. As an educator, and a person who is personally invested in the lives of my students, part of the job lies on me to ensure that I am exposing my students to every possible opportunity that I can, but the rest is on them and their parents to carry it throughout the rest of their lives.
Access Evidence 1
Access Evidence 2
Access Evidence 3
Access Evidence 4
Access Evidence 5