Skip to main content

What's Your Bench?

As my blended classroom continues to evolve and grow into a more effective classroom every week, I am quickly realizing how this venture is not as frustrating or frightening as I made it in my head at the beginning of the year. Each week, I learn from my mistakes and improve upon my practice; giving my students and myself a better blended classroom experience each day and each week.
In previous posts, I mentioned it's all about the learning, and that is true. No matter the device, it all has to come back to the learning for the students but also for the teacher. What I am learning is that as I incorporate the blended learning into my classroom, I still must incorporate my strengths as a 14 year teacher into as well. If I don't, then problems and frustrations quickly rise. For example, I have never been a teacher who can effectively manage log sheets of students work, so when I tried having students record their daily work at the independent learning station and turn their log sheets in at the end of the week, it quickly failed and led to frustration for the students and me. It ended up just being a waste of paper, which is comical since I am trying to cut down on paper. Another example is me having station outline sheets that describe what students are to be doing at every station every day. I found that this was helpful in the beginning, but that nice, yellow cardstalk, laminated sheets just ended up sitting there with the students never looking at them.

What I failed to do on both cases was identify and incorporate my strengths. Once I did realize them, then I started getting the quality of work that I wanted from my students. All I had to do was do what I was good at for the majority of my career, which was listing the objectives clearly and simply on the smartboard at the beginning of class when I had all of their attention. The bench press was never my strength, so I never should have been trying to bench heavy. Endurance exercises are my strengths, so I should have been focusing on endurance exercises. Either way is an effective workout, but you just have to know and trust your strengths to get the most effective workout for you.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

K.I.S.S.

Third week into the blended learning classroom and I felt pretty good with how things were going. Still a little messy. Still some bellyflops. But overall I was happy with the progression. Then, specials happened. This cut my class time down from 70 minutes to 50 minutes. Just when there was a flow starting to occur, I was forced to try to figure out the best approach to run the stations with a shortened class. I knew the day we would have specials would mean shortened class times. So it was not a surprise to me, but somehow that day just snuck up. What I discovered in trying to figure out the best approach for that day, turned out to be the best approach for every day. I ended up simplifying the stations and rotations, which made for a much more efficient class and positive comments from my students. I took that simplified approach into the rest of the week, and things really started to take off like I had been envisioning since last year. All I had to do was just keep things si...
Post a Comment
Read more

Snow Day? Shovel Your Way Out

It is 5:30 AM on a weekday during the winter and the phone rings. That can only mean one thing, SNOW DAY! I have to admit, at that moment, I do not feel like the 15 year veteran, sixth grade teacher I am, but rather, I feel like one of my sixth grade students. I roll back over in bed and fall back asleep, only to get woken up by my wife as she gets up to get ready for work (seems like she is extra loud getting ready on snow days...nah, she wouldn't do that, would she?). I tell her to, "Keep it down. I'm trying to sleep. I've got a snow day." That goes over about as well as getting a snowball in the face. Living in Pennsylvania, snow days are part of the school year and one of the great perks about being a teacher, unless you end up having too many of them. Then you have to make them up in the summer. Then they quickly become an inconvenience. They can also become an inconvenience with what you had planned for class those days. Inspired by Matt Miller's Dit...
Post a Comment
Read more

PETE&C 2016 Reflections

I attended my first PETE&C conference this past week with my district's technology director. What an incredible amount of sharing from so many passionate educators. There were so many practical, student-centered, and forward thinking ideas there that were shared. With all of the positive energy and exciting ideas, I couldn't wait to get back into my classroom and start to try them all. But with so many ideas to take away from PETE&C 2016, where would I begin? So, I started reflecting about my time at PETE&C, and the biggest take-away for me, after reflecting, was the idea of sharing. All of those educators were there to share, so that teachers and students could have better learning experiences going forward. Then it became clear to me. I have to stop thinking about my classroom and starting thinking about the school and the district. Now the only question, how do I effectively help bring back all of those exciting, practical, student-centered, and forward think...
Post a Comment
Read more