I was way more scared than I should have been!

Fifth Grade Registration Day

This quarter we had registration day for incoming fifth grade students and their parents to experience Wheeler Middle School and the classes that they will be taking next year. When I first heard about this, the first thing that came to mind was "wouldn't it be cool if we had some student involvement as well?" I swiftly set about to get current students who could act as older buddies of sorts to help the incoming students with any questions or concerns that they may have. Three of my most proactive students stepped up to the plate to help out. They brought samples of things that they had done in sixth grade to show the fifth grade students and parents, and then when the incoming fifth graders were wandering around the campus to register for classes, these students were walking around helping answer questions and directing them. Another team in sixth grade got together five students of their own, so we ended up having 8 current students walking around, answering questions, and helping out. Next year when I do this I am aiming to have a stronger presence of current students, and more parents as well, to help with the process, it really did seem to make a huge difference.

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Socratic Seminars

Something that I have been trying to incorporate more into my classroom this quarter was Socratic Seminars. I found these to be especially useful in terms of developing my students' critical thinking and critical questioning skills. I took a much more scaffolded approach to it and modified the process a little to meet the needs of my students. At the beginning of the process we spent the first few weeks just practicing questioning skills; questioning texts, questioning each other, the books we were independently reading, the novel we were reading as a class, news articles, anything that we could question we would. We also broke our questions down into DOK (depth of knowledge) 1, 2, 3 levels to understand our questioning. The students got really good at creating and distinguishing between different types of questions. From the questioning strategies we moved to answering. What I was noticing in my first few rounds of attempts at socratic seminars was that their questioning strategies were really good, but they weren't able to take the discussions further than simple responses. This prompted me to work on having large questions, with time to answer, then discussions of the answers, with purposeful grouping of students who had distinctive differences in opinions to responses. This process of a modified Socratic Seminar helped move the students in the direction of understanding how to question and respond, and I have confidence that they will be able to get much better moving forward. 

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SBA Preparation

Using the TeenBiz data tracker I have been able to see how my students are performing on tasks and activities aligned to advancing their critical thinking skills and lexile scores. According to the data, of my 50 kids, 6 are fall below being ready, of those 6, 3 are new students and as such don't have as much data, which could be skewing the results. The 27 students that are in the approaches range, are students that I feel I can really work with to make sure that they are prepared. We have been working on critical thinking and engagement strategies such as the Stanford Read Like a Historian lesson plans, Socratic Seminars and discussions, practice SBAC performance tasks, and essay writing. One of the things that I am most worried about is that a lot of my students are slow typers. It makes sense that if you can't type quickly, you may be able to think quick enough to answer a question, but if you can't type as fast as your thoughts, it will be more difficult to finish on time. I have every confidence in my students' abilities to do the work, but the timing is what I am most nervous about. 

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Going into Fourth Quarter

Areas to work on

• I recognize that I need to work on data collection, I have been finding other ways to collect meaningful data and differentiate based off of that information, but want to find other ways as well
• I want to work on differentiating instruction better in class. I have been relying on TeenBiz which has been very useful for that respect, but would also like to have more group work in class in which all students can help each other and it's less one-sided
• Communication home is something I want to really work on next quarter. I am making it a point to have all current and working email addresses and phone numbers for all of my students' families so that I can be in constant communication for both positive and constructive reasons 

Strengths

• I've definitely seen an increase in the culture of learning in my classroom, students understanding how their work is setting them up for the future
• Classroom culture is still good :) they respect each other and show respect towards me
• Giving the students opportunities to work together and learn from each other through heterogenous grouping based off of skill level
• Student helpers in the classroom who are able to reexplain material to students