Introduction

I am a NYC teacher and, for a number of reasons, I  work at a summer program in New Jersey and have done so for the past several years.  I live in New Jersey so this is much easier than schlepping into the city to teach summer school.  Pam, one of my colleagues in this program, graciously agreed to give me a lesson and some of her time to complete this project.

Pam is an elementary teacher at the Hurden Looker School in Hillside, New Jersey.  In many ways it is not unlike many schools across New York City.  According to Public School Review, the school enrolls 391 students across grades two through six.  Forty-eight percent of the students are black, forty percent are Hispanic and eleven percent are white.  The number of students achieving proficiency in math and English is well below the statewide average.  Hurden Looker is Title I eligible with 74.3 percent of enrolled students eligible for free and reduced-price lunches. (National Center for Educational Statistics)

We decided to look at a lesson for a sixth grade ELA class she taught this past year and plans, mutatis mutandis, to teach again.  It is part of a unit on literary elements and narrator point of view offered in the first quarter of the academic year.  The unit is intended to prepare her students for the later Roald Dahl unit and for the springtime state assessments where students are given part of a story and then asked to complete it using the same perspective, style and tone of the author.

The school administration encourages the use of technology in the classroom but does not have a school wide technology policy.  Each classroom has a Promethean board and set of ChromeBooks for student use.  Google Slides and Docs, Pam admits to not using much technology in her lesson.  One obstacle for her is the administration’s rigid prescription for the structure of the ELA block that discourages direct instruction that she feels is necessary to develop students’ competencies using digital tools.

Reflection

The first reaction to the revised lesson plan was “that’s a lot of tech.”  Nevertheless, Pam was open to the recommendations admitting that she needs to use more technology in her classroom.  I pointed out, with the exception of Kahoot!, all the other digital tools were from the G-Suite: Slides, Docs and Classroom.  These are digital tools that she is already using so the learning curve here involves greater integration into existing planning and classroom routines.  Moreover, these recommendations do not all need to be implemented simultaneously.  My own experience as an ICT co-teacher working with colleagues who are unable to move beyond a perfunctory and limited deployment of the G-Suite tools has made me think a great deal about how to encourage and facilitate incremental increase in the deployment of digital tools in the curriculum.  In contrast, observing and talking with some of my more technologically proficient colleagues, the intentional thinking about using technology and its resulting use becomes a virtuous cycle begetting greater use of technology in the classroom.  For some it is all about winning hearts and minds one application at a time.     

Interestingly, Pam’s reaction was much more tepid towards the shifts in her pedagogy that the 5E model necessitated.  I chose this model in response to her need to better differentiate for her SWDs, ELLs, students well below grade and students at grade level.  5E offers ample time for her to one-to-one conference with all her students and provides instructional space within its routine for reteaching or extending the explanation phase with selected groups of students.  She was hesitant about the level of independence and choice that the model affords students within the scope of the day’s learning objectives.  Pam concedes that some of this is her own unease relinquishing some of the control that comes from a very teacher centered habit of instruction.  Her other reservation is similar to the one I mentioned in my Lab 2 reflection: how does one in a heterogeneous classroom create independent activities that are not accessible to, but will advance the learning of all students across a vast continuum of ability and requisite skills/knowledge?  Moveover, how do you justify the tradeoff with explicit instruction time that could be used to remediate some of these deficiencies?  At the risk of sounding like an administrator, to mitigate the tradeoff, it is all in the planning.  Planning that is of course intentional, but also incremental, to shift in one’s practice so that one can sustain it over 180 lessons?   

Not to wax entirely negative here, Pam did seem open to most of the suggestions.  We looked at Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction, also which allows for a more teacher directed opening to the day’s activity.  Again, in the vein of incrementalism, the opening of the learning activity, which comprises Gagne’s first three events, allows for a more prominent role of the teacher in comparison to 5E.  Pam was much more open to this approach since it would allow her to transition from the mandated do now of sentence error analysis to the day’s topic.  The fourth moment as elaborated by the University of Florida’s website let us think how to enhance her Google Slides by designing them not just for the in-class presentation but also a stand alone resource in Google Classroom wherein additional resources (scaffolds and enrichment) are linked for students to access as needed.   

In the end, Pam felt most comfortable about two of my recommendations for optimizing the technology already in use.  First, by thinking about how to expand the functionality of her slide presentations so that they can function as a resource for all students inside and outside the classroom for the rest of the year.  Different slide decks via Google Classroom can be assigned to selected students so that while students will have identical slides for the parts that were shared during the mini-lesson, the slides containing the resources and other links can be differentiated for different ability levels and shared accordingly. Pam does agree with my rationale to use Google Docs for every final draft of every written assignment to archive a large sample of each student’s output to, if needed, assess outcomes that are not measured by state exams or determine/revise annual goals for SWDs.

We agreed to talk about that later.   The second recommendation that she liked in the Gagne resource was using interactive tools such as MentiMeter (in lieu of proper clickers) as an easy way to improve student engagement.