My final project and letter to my students is linked below
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oQpvvTLOQvyW8WhowH2uQAYykYkku6Zy0drC7f6XlD4/edit?usp=sharing
Teaching for Change
Saturday, June 30, 2018
Cycle 2
Use the link below to see my presentation about my connections to the world
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/16kp1L-bJFNzLJwzrCctnXa3Gq9AHdw-hz15dkvIfcp8/edit?usp=sharing
Thursday, May 31, 2018
Cycle 1: Globalization, Global Education, and Global Belonging
One of my biggest takeaways from this week’s readings is that
we as teachers are not using the “flattening” of the Earth to our advantage or
globalization to our advantage to nearly the degree most of us could be.
This was illustrated to me in part by how much I learned
reading the article “It’s
a Flat World After All,’ from which the term “flattening” used above was
coined. The author argues that because of globalization the world has become an
even “flat” playing field. I don’t know that our world is as globalized as
Thomas Friedman argues it is. Several other people make good arguments about
how it is not, such as Pankaj Ghemawat in his TED talk “Actually,
the world isn’t flat.” Regardless of how flat the Earth is at this point, I
think most people agree that globalization is increasing.
In the same article linked above, Friedman quoted Bill Gates who
said
“When I compare our high
schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work
force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top
students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By
12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized
nations.”
This then begs the question, what do we do now? How do we as
educators prepare our students?
To answer this question we need to look at places like India
and China where students are studying and using the technology they have to
learn and grow and develop. Not to look at cat pictures. The amount of technology
and information students today have at their fingertips constantly amazes me. I
had to look things up in books and hope they had it and it wasn’t out of date.
Then we got the internet and we were amazed at how fast we could get information.
We would boot up the computer, maybe do something else while it got itself
turned on, then wait for the dial up stuff to go through, and then wait for
each (very basic) web page to load.
I now have a smart phone in my pocket at almost all times and
I think I have begun to take the access to information for granted. It makes
sense, as we become accustomed to something, we begin to take it for granted.
That is human nature, but reading this was a good reminder of how much power we
have in our back pockets.
Our students have this power. They may not all have a smart phone
or a computer or internet at home, but most of them have something and all of
them have access at school and libraries.
One problem lies in how few of our students take advantage of
this access.
So many of my students have very little drive and engagement
in school. I see two main reasons for this. 1. They are middle class and assume
they will continue to be regardless of whether or not they put in much effort
beyond passing their classes or 2. They are poor or highly impacted in other
ways and have lost any hope that there is more out there in the world for them.
We as teachers have a responsibility to help our students see
that they will need to be able to compete with people from around the world and
that they have the capability and if needed the support to do so if they decide
to.
So the question becomes how do we help these types of
learners?
How do we help them understand the competition they will be
up against to help them take their work more seriously? How do help them
understand that they have the power to compete and to do well? How do we engage
them in learning and developing when they would rather be playing fortnite?
I don’t know that I have an answer right now. I agree that
our schools need some drastic changes and I believe things like Project Based
Learning and Expeditionary Learning are helping some schools head in the right
direction, but it’s not enough.
I don’t feel like I have a lot of answers right now, however,
I also think our students deserve to know the truth about our and their places in
the greater global world and they deserve teachers who will tell the truth and
then empower them and help them figure out how to make the most of it and their
lives.
Sunday, May 13, 2018
Introductory Post TE 867
Hello all,
My name is Rose Pompey and I am a middle school teacher in
Arvada Colorado.
I have been teaching four and a half years, since I graduated
from the University of Northern Colorado in December of 2013. I began my career
teaching ESL at a high school in Greeley where I worked with students in grades
9-12, ages 14-21, from a wide variety of different countries, many of whom were
refugees. After spending a semester with them I moved down to the Denver area
where I taught both “regular” 6th and 7th grade social
studies and sheltered 6th and 7th grade social studies
for students learning English. I was again at diverse and highly impacted
school were I worked with students from a number of different countries. I
taught there for three years before moving to my current school where I am now
teaching 8th grade social studies. The students I work with
currently are less diverse in terms of what countries they were born in,
primarily the US with a few from Mexico and two from China. Overall, the switch
was a good one and I’m glad to be in the school I am now, but I do miss having
students from so many different places.
Outside of work, I am an avid reader, since the school year
started in August I have read over 60 books. One of my favorite things to do is
curl up on my couch with my 2 cats and a good book. I was born and raised in
Colorado, but I love the ocean and if I ever leave the state, I am moving to a
beach town. I am also taking my last two classes before I complete my masters,
this one and TE 872. I will be done June 28th!
This picture is of me and most of the students in one of my
sheltered classes 2 years ago. I choose this photo for a couple of reasons. The
first reason is that there are students from 7 countries represented in this
picture alone. Most of my personal experience in global education has been in
working with students who are new to the United States and I love learning from
their different perspectives on and experiences with the world and education. The
other reason I choose this picture is because I believe that part of my job as
a teacher, particularly as a social studies teacher, is to help my students
become global citizens capable of living and working in a society that is globally
connected more and more every day. My hope is that this class will help me be
better able to do just that.
Saturday, July 22, 2017
Cycle Two: Challenges and Opportunities in Building Classroom Communities
A student said this to me last winter after we had discussed
college in our advising period. A few weeks earlier a different student asked
me how she could move to the A team, she said she wanted to go to college and
she thought she had to be on the A team to be able to go.
Two years ago when we decided to move to a teaming structure I was
excited. We were a large middle school with over 1,000 students in grades 6-8.
Creating teams so students could share the same teachers and build a community
within their team made sense. Instead of
having to check to see which English teacher (A, B, C, or D) a student had, I
would know that they had English teacher D and math teacher D. It seemed like a
good way to make things simpler and make a big school feel more like a small
one.
When we started this up I, naively, thought that the students
would be distributed randomly, much like teachers at a small school end up whoever
comes to the school. I quickly discovered this was not the case. Instead it was decided that we would have
four teams. One team would have all the kids who received special education services,
to make it easier for the special education teachers to co-teach. Another team
would teach all the advanced classes. A third team would take on the English
Language Learners so they could provide sheltered instruction and work with the
ELL teachers. A fourth team was added for the kids who didn’t fit under those categories.
I understood the reasoning behind this, I didn’t like it, but I understood it.
It was easier. Next the teams were named: A, B, C, and D. The advanced classes
went to the A team. The kids who didn’t necessarily fit into a category became
the B team. The students receiving services from special education became the C
team, and finally the ELL’s became the D team. If you’re thinking that the
names look like the grades the students on those teams were expected to get,
you are not the only one.
If you are thinking that this is blatant tracking, again you’re
not the only one. There are piles and piles of evidence that show that tracking
is not helping our students, in fact it is harming them. Check out Keeping Track, Part 1: The
Policy and Practice Of Curriculum Inequality for detailed information.
The article Modern-Day
Segregation in Public Schools makes the argument that tracking became a way
to segregate schools after direct segregation was outlawed by Brown V. Board of
Education, something that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights
agrees with and is trying to fix. This article also argues that this
segregation is based again on race. I did not see much segregation based
directly on race in my school, primarily because at least 90% of the students
in the school were students of color. However, I did see direct segregation
based on the language spoken at home (which correlates with race) and indirect
segregation based on socio-economic status.
This was done at my school primarily to make things easier for the
teachers. This is the same argument you will generally hear in favor of
tracking. There is some validity to it, tracking can in some ways make some
things easier for teachers. That, however, is not enough to justify doing
something that is causing harm to our students.
Additionally, I don’t believe that making “things easier” for
teachers is the real reason behind tracking. If that was our end goal we would
decrease class sizes, hire more paras to assist, pay teachers more, etc. That’s
not the end goal behind tracking. The end goal behind tracking is to keep the
status quo. To keep our communities segregated and to exclude people from
joining the community in our country who hold the vast majority of the power.
The 1%. People of color, people who didn’t grow up with money, people who have
immigrated here, are not wanted within 1% (or even really the top 20%).
I’m not saying that people in my school were directly trying to
keep people segregated and lesson the opportunities they have because of one or
more of their identities. Many of the people who are pro-tracking are not directly
trying to do this. This does not, however, change the fact that it is happening
regardless of intent.
Educational philosopher Gary Fenstermacher wrote that, "using
individual differences in aptitude, ability, or interest as the basis for
curricular variation denies students equal access to the knowledge and
understanding available to humankind." That is exactly the goal of
tracking. To deny people access to knowledge and to keep the status quo within communities
across the country. It’s time we recognize this and make change so that all students
can have equal access, so that all students can go to college if they want to,
regardless of what “team” they are on.
Sunday, July 16, 2017
Cycle One: Interpretations of the Meaning and Causes of Failure
Failure. The very word can induce anxiety; cause my chest to
tighten and my breath to speed up. Throughout my time in school the goal was
always to get as many points as I possibly could on every assignment. Just the
letter F inspired fear. The thought of seeing that letter, circled in red, on
even one assignment terrified me. I couldn’t even think about failing a class. I
was an A/B student. I didn’t get F’s. I was going to college and I wasn’t going
to fail. End of story.
That was my life throughout high school. I can’t tell you a
single thing I learned when I took advanced chemistry in 11th grade,
but I can tell you I got an A in the class. I don’t think I understood much of
it, but I knew how to play the game and how to get the 90 something % on an assignment.
The fear of failure was double sided. On the one hand, it got me though school.
I graduated with a 3.9 gpa and a scholarship to college. That same fear also
prevented me from really learning some of the subjects I studied because I was
too scared to risk a lower grade for a shot at deeper understanding.
This fear of failure is prevalent throughout our society. Inside
of schools we work to ward off failure. We have made failure into the ultimate
negative. This mindset does not leave us room for multiple attempts at
something or for trying something that may or may not work. We have developed a culture of grade grabbing
where students try to amass as many points as they possibly can on every assignment.
I am now a teacher. It is my job to assess if students pass
or fail. That is a power I have always felt uncomfortable with. I can tell you
if my student made progress or not. I can tell you if their understanding and
their skills have grown. But to say that they pass or that they fail. I
struggle with that. If I have a student who goes from earning a 10% on a test
to a 50%, I am technically supposed to say that he failed. But to me that’s not
failure. The student made 40% growth; he in theory knows 40% than he did when
he started. How can we call that failure?
So what is failure? Webster’s defines failure as a “lack of
success.” A lack of success. Okay, that definition doesn’t sound so scary, so
what’s so bad about failure? The phase “a lack of success” seems innocuous enough
and it certainly doesn’t sound like something deserving of a panic attack. A
lack of success seems like something you move though and then continue on. Failure
sounds much more permanent.
Now, let’s go back to that student of mine from earlier. He went
from a 10% to a 50%. Is that a lack of success? I don’t think so. He may not
understand or be able to do all of it yet, but I would not call that a lack of
success. I would call that progress.
Does this structure work? I don’t believe it does.
Great discoveries and works throughout history have almost
always, if not always, involved failure. How many inventions wouldn’t exist if
someone out there was too afraid of failure to take a risk? How many books would
not have been written, and songs not sung because someone gave up at the first
sign of failure?
What are our students missing while they try to accumulate
points? What are our students not learning? There are a wide variety of studies
and articles that show that failure enhances learning. I’m not going to make
that point here, if you want to read if you can check out Failure
Is Essential to Learning or The
Benefits of Failure.
So how can we take that and apply it to the context of our
schools? How can we provide our students the chance to fail without “failing.”
How can we give them those opportunities in a system that grades everything
they do?
Giving them this is not simple, tweak one thing kind of work.
To make this work for our students we
are going to need to change our very system. It’s time to get rid of the “F”
and the meaningless percentages. One way we can do this by moving to standards
based grading. Standards based grading is based on the principle that students
are assessed on the various standards they need to learn to move on to the next
course. Students use a variety of ways to prove that they are proficient at
each standard. A key piece of this is that students can keep trying and more
towards proficiency without being punished for not knowing something yet. The article “Seven
Reasons for Standards-Based Grading” provides strong support for this type
of system, including showing how standards based grading provides grades that
actually have meaning and how it gives everyone involved (teachers, parents,
and the students themselves) much more information about what the student knows
and can do.
I personally would have learned more under a system like
this that would have allowed me to fear failure less and learn more in the
process. A 94% on a test covering a variety of topics only showed me that I
knew how to take a test. It didn’t really show what pieces of chemistry I
understood and which ones I still needed to work on. We need to shift to give
our students this type of feedback. The failure and feedback that will help
them grow and take risks and learn more than they ever thought possible.
Sunday, July 9, 2017
Introductory Post –TE 823
Hello all,
My name is Rose Pompey and I have been teaching three and a half years. I attended the University of Northern Colorado, where I majored in Social Science/Secondary education and completed an endorsement in Teaching English as a Second Language. I graduated in December of 2013 and started my teaching career immediately by accepting a position teaching ESL at a high school in Greeley. After that semester I moved down to the Denver metro area where I spent three years teaching middle school social studies in Aurora. At the end of month I am moving to the other side of the Denver metro area (the NW rather than the SE) where I will be teaching 8th grade social studies at a middle school in Arvada. All of my time teaching has been spent working with highly impacted populations, including students of color, students receiving free/reduced lunch, English Language Learners, and students receiving special education services.
Outside of work I read extensively, I have two cats, and I like riding my bike. I also enjoy spending time with friends and family. This year I spent the first week of summer in Washington DC with a group of 8th grade students, which I loved. Two weeks I ago I went to Denver Comic Con with some friends from college and at the end of the month I am moving, so I have been attempting to pack and clean. I am taking three classes, which will leave me with just two more to finish up next summer before I can graduate. I have also been enjoying The Handmaid’s Tale on hulu, I highly recommend it.
The number one work of art that situates my values and motivations as a teacher is Star Trek. For those of you who may not be familiar with Star Trek it is a collection of five (soon to be six) TV series and 13 movies. The series is set in the future where the people of Earth live in harmony with races from other planets in The United Federation of Planets. In Star Trek poverty, and even the need for money, has been eliminated. In the words of Captain Picard “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity” (Star Trek: First Contact). This is why I teach. I teach so that we can work to better ourselves and our society and move towards something like the federation depicted in Star Trek. I believe that every student has the capacity to learn and the right to an education. I teach to ensure that every student gets access to that education.
Outside of work I read extensively, I have two cats, and I like riding my bike. I also enjoy spending time with friends and family. This year I spent the first week of summer in Washington DC with a group of 8th grade students, which I loved. Two weeks I ago I went to Denver Comic Con with some friends from college and at the end of the month I am moving, so I have been attempting to pack and clean. I am taking three classes, which will leave me with just two more to finish up next summer before I can graduate. I have also been enjoying The Handmaid’s Tale on hulu, I highly recommend it.
The number one work of art that situates my values and motivations as a teacher is Star Trek. For those of you who may not be familiar with Star Trek it is a collection of five (soon to be six) TV series and 13 movies. The series is set in the future where the people of Earth live in harmony with races from other planets in The United Federation of Planets. In Star Trek poverty, and even the need for money, has been eliminated. In the words of Captain Picard “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity” (Star Trek: First Contact). This is why I teach. I teach so that we can work to better ourselves and our society and move towards something like the federation depicted in Star Trek. I believe that every student has the capacity to learn and the right to an education. I teach to ensure that every student gets access to that education.
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Cycle 3
My final project and letter to my students is linked below https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oQpvvTLOQvyW8WhowH2uQAYykYkku6Zy0drC7f6XlD4...
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Hello all, My name is Rose Pompey and I have been teaching three and a half years. I attended the University of Northern Colorado, where I m...
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Hello all, My name is Rose Pompey and I am a middle school teacher in Arvada Colorado. I have been teaching four and a half years, sin...
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My final project and letter to my students is linked below https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oQpvvTLOQvyW8WhowH2uQAYykYkku6Zy0drC7f6XlD4...