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Wow, it sure has been a minute since I last touched base here. Let's take stock as to what's happened in my educational life in that timeframe. My students have been doing well in their small groups! While I haven't yet had the opportunity to put together, and run, small group lessons based on How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction, basing my small group instruction on my students blend it books has been showing significant reading progress. My students are also motivated to come work at my back table, which creates a high engagement place to tackle chunking out words. That routine feels like a success :) I held most of my parent teacher conferences, before and after school. Most of my days were 10-12 hour days, which honestly felt close to impossible. I hate to be the teacher that complains about extra hours, because it does come with the territory. But it's very difficult to to complete a parent teacher conference when your battery is drained from teaching all day, or when your focus is on what students need to learn for the day. A specific day set aside for conferences is truly what is best, for students, parents, and teachers alike. That leads me to my next point, and the point of the blog post, Teacher Burnout. Teacher Burnout was something I decided I wanted to write about the week of conferences, but I doubled down even more after talking to a number of the teachers in my building this week. I work in a building of incredibly supportive staff, both of each other, and our students. But, even amongst this supportive space, teachers at my school are getting fed up with the extra tasks that are continually asked of us. Rolling out a new curriculum? "Take some time this week to take a look at the new lessons, to see if you want to incorporate them into your classrooms this week or next!" After school Zoom meetings seem to compile, and did I mention, that my school district doesn't have planning time? Aside from 35 minutes every two days, and lunch, my students are pretty much always in the classroom with me. There are murmurs of "too much" and "when do we have the time", as I walk the halls, and I can't say that I disagree. Lesson planning responsibilities, the paperwork of teaching, all of these things are unavoidable, and need to be dealt with at some point. This discussion of teacher burnout begs a relevant question: So why haven't I posted to my blog in two weeks? Honestly, by the time I get home from school, I'm in a state of shutdown. Education is a passion, and that will never change, but the constant call of "MS BARNHART" does get draining. The need for silence, for rest, at the end of the day is palpable. But, usually, there's still work to be done. Papers to grade, a classroom to clean, emails to send, paperwork to deal with. It can sometimes feel like the responsibilities just keep compounding, with no real solution other than simply surviving. Hobbies like writing? Reading? A blog, partially in place to keep my mental health afloat? Fall by the wayside, and I know I'm not the only teacher that feels this way. Crafty teachers are putting down their glue guns, technology inclined teachers are plugging up their laptops and don't even get me started on the specials teachers. Heck, I'm a reading teacher, and I haven't finished a chapter book (that wasn't a student read aloud) since October. Teachers are tired, no, more than tired. Exhausted. Depleted. This is a real problem, a problem that could change the entire landscape of education if it isn't properly addressed. I feel like this dynamic is best exemplified by an experience I had at a work training today. This training was for Annie's Big Nature Lesson, a field trip that I am extremely excited to take my kids on. My excitement was clear, and as I talked about how this year has been an "exciting" one, my trainer looked at me in a state of what I could only describe as awe. "We need to get you on a billboard" she said, continuing that "that just isn't the way people see education these days". She's not wrong, and I could even feel that my own passion, while real, felt... off. This is a tangible example of the way that Teacher Burnout is changing the landscape of education. Excited and motivated educators are still there but quiet, drained, showing up daily mostly just for the kids that they love. The spark of joy has been placed by apathetic following of COVID restrictions. Teacher burnout is sucking the joy our of education, but worse, it's sucking the joy our of our teachers. So what can be done? As a new teacher to the district, I feel in no way qualified to answer this question. I will, however, echo the sentiment that has followed me since we came back to in person learning. The need for social emotional learning in the classroom is a REAL one. It can be easy, especially with so many students academically behind, to get locked into a grind for raised test scores. In fact, the way that our system is set up, the grind for test scores is almost inevitable right now. Student growth means government funding, which means opportunities for students and teachers. That being said, the emotional needs of our teachers and students should not be put to the wayside in lieu of pushing standardized testing. Social emotional learning lessons are a must for building positive classroom community this year. But more than that, TEACHERS NEED TO TAKE A BREAK. Not a break where they're at home grading papers. Not a break where they're checking emails, or doing lesson plans, or making student projects. No, teachers need a sincere break where they can come home, and put some energy back into their own lives. If we continue to overwork our teachers to such a significant point, will there be enough educators left in the field? What happens if there aren't? Is that a sustainable future to our country? Essentially? The answer is a shift in our educational landscape. A change in requirement, and expectation, on our current teachers. If this can't be achieved, I feel that that teacher burnout will continue to be a problem.
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This week, I was attending a professional development where the deeper areas of reading development were being discussed. In the Lansing School District, students reading development is a hot button issue right now. Theories were being presented, in which the varying needs of the students in the class could be addressed. Many of the comments in the Zoom chat talked about how this was the impossibility, these theories being "beautiful, but not able to be implemented in the classroom". One teacher even commented that differentiation was a curse word! This was insane to me, given the dynamic of what I've seen in this classroom; and in classrooms that I've worked in since students returned after the pandemic.
I teach 2nd grade, after spending a lot of my professional career working in 1st. When I first walked into the classroom, one of the first things I noticed was my students were extremely lacking in phonetic ability. I would tell them to write in their notebooks, and many would only write a sentence. Just this would cause some to melt down completely. Some of my students would only be able to write 'sentences' that looked like strings of letters. My school uses DRA as an assessment tool, and at the beginning of the year, my students ranged from a Level A, to a level 18. From the moment of entering the room, I was plagued with the issue of how to reach all of these kids at where they were at, while still challenging my students at grade level. I began with running sight word assessments and using my DRA assessments to begin to put small groups together. Even with this though, I was struggling with routines that I could use for small group instruction. The most I had was decodable readers, that were not at the level that my lower kids needed. I also supplemented these tools with alphabetic recognition assessments. I expressed these concerns in a meeting with my mentor teacher, as I was worried about how it would affect my students testing, and overall, progress. If they didn't understand the basics, how were they going to understand 2nd grade level, whole group content? She suggested using the text: How to Plan Differentiated Reading Instruction as a skeleton for small group reading instruction. There's an assessment called the Informal Decoding Inventory, that identifies where students are at phonetically. I ran this assessment, as well as rerunning the Letter Names and Recognition assessment with some of my newer, struggling, students. I then, used this assessment data as well as the Words Their Way to put together new, targeted, reading groups. For each of these reading groups, students are given a "blend it book", with words that are specified to a phonetic skill (my class ranges from short vowels, digraphs, vowel teams, and irregular word endings). During centers this week, one of the centers is that students need to read their blend it book three times, circling the words that they aren't familiar with. Then, I call the students to my table 2-4 at a time, who are reading the same book. I have students use Elkonian boxes to sound out the words in the story they are unfamiliar with (highlighting the phonetic skill the book is supposed to be teaching). I also run small group sight word lessons, and with each word, would have students go back to the text, and underline that word in the text. This structure is a new one in my classroom, and so I'm excited to see how well it works out. So far, I've had a number of students that can completely read their blend it books, and can sound out all of the tricky words. I'm excited to see how my students progress with this new information! |
Lindsay BarnhartJust a teacher, trying her best to learn as much as she can about Education :) Archives
March 2022
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