With all the griping during institute and round 0 Teach For America has prepared us well.
We had district meetings Monday and Tuesday. These meetings are for new teachers to the district many of which are lateral entry and recent school of education graduates. The point of these meetings is to introduce new teachers to lesson planing, the achievement gap, and the rigors of teaching. These mismatched slides are all many people get before entering the classroom. Which is shocking.
This is not to say CM's are experts on these subjects. And I am no expert on the academics of education. But being knowledgeable about how to push your students despite overwhelming poverty is critical. The idea of having the same BIG ambitious goal for ALL of your students regardless of circumstance was foreign to many of my workshop participants and they were a virgin to these concepts until last this Monday.
Assessments Daily? why? that's so much work? asks my co-science teacher at my school. Yes I will try to assess 60 students daily. It is my goal for my 120 students to be assessed 3-2 times a week (We have a bi-daily schedule). It is my goal to continually increase my effectiveness based on if they are achieving their goal. They will be tracked they will be aware of their progression to my class goal. Every day I will DOG them about how they can increase their effectiveness because I will DOG myself to increase my effectiveness.Why will I do this: because many live in poverty and this is there only shot to make it. My tracking is life saving.
No back to our orientation days. 2/3rds of the new teachers at our district meeting/orientation are Teach For America CMs. Our last day we created lesson plans in groups of 4. In my group there were 3 CM's and a non-CM. The three of us were quickly bouncing ideas off each other. We self nominated a group leader who conducted us. Our traditional teacher questioned us achieving to objectives in one lesson. She questioned the practicality of us sending home homework when we were teaching at a title I school. Finally she had no idea what we meant when we kept saying "how do we assess them", "how does this work into a class goal" "wait we need to go back and backwards plan from the state standards and end of year standard test".
Teach For America should be proud. We were in our rooms in our professional dress. Hunkered into groups getting stuff done. I think our training has served us well
