Job Search (What there is of it)

I have managed to avoid talking about my job search the duration of this class, but I figured what better time to discuss the issue than my last blog. So here is the gist.

In short...it has been pretty nonexistent. Why? I cannot seem to figure out how to balance being a mother and being a teacher. During student teaching, I really struggled with being away from my daughter (now 19 months old) and having her in the arms of daycare or a nanny so many hours of the day. With her being so young, I felt that I was missing valuable time that I would never get back. And I absolutely hated experiencing second-hand all of the firsts that happen during this age. I think I cried 90 percent of the days I had to leave her while I was student teaching (I think I cried the other 10 percent because I was so stressed and sleep deprived). I know a lot of people, if not the majority of people now-a-days, use childcare in order to continue their career, or out of need to support their family, but I want to be the one that raises my child and to be the one that experiences all of the special moments.

Another added layer of complexity, my husband has been traveling 4 or 5 days a week for the past 10 months (the last 4 months of which included me student teaching, us selling our condo in Chicago, living and commuting from Wisconsin for 5 weeks, and then buying and moving into a new house in the suburbs). At the moment, it is uncertain whether my husband will have to continue to travel for work. With him being gone so much, I have struggled to handle all of the house and parenting workload on my own, let alone the school workload, and I cannot find the justification to look for a job. Not only is my husband away from my daughter often, how can I be gone all of the time too?

But how do I abandon my career until my daughter starts going to school (or longer since we hope to have another child)? If I do not do anything pertaining to teaching for several years, how will I ever be a competitive candidate for a teaching position?

I have found myself in a position where I think it is best for me and my family if I search for a local, part-time tutoring position, whether it be through a school or private institution, in order to at least keep my skills and resume current. So here my search begins! Hopefully I can find something to fit the bill.

If anyone has any advice or words of wisdom on being a parent and educator, I would love to hear it. And I hope everyone else is finding what they have been searching for. Best of luck with your own job search!

Emerging Technology in the Classroom

It cannot be denied that we live in a society driven by technology, with new technologies emerging everyday. The current trend is that "technology continues to profoundly affect the way we work, collaborate, communicate, and succeed. Information technologies impact how people work, play, learn, socialize, and collaborate" (2010 Horizon Report: K12 Edition). This reality needs to be addressed and brought into our classrooms and included in the general curriculum. This statement brings me to a critical problem that currently exists in education: students are changing rapidly, "but educational practice and the materials that support it are changing only slowly" (2010 Horizon Report: K12 Edition). In response to this problem, The New Media Consortium has been supporting an ongoing research effort to "identif[y] and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within education around the globe" (2010 Horizon Report: K12 Edition). The annual report released by The New Media Consortium is a great resource that summarizes the current trends, critical challenges and emerging technologies surrounding education. I found this report to be an excellent resource not only for information about issue of technology in education, but also for new ideas to bring into the classroom.

One technology in the report that really resonated with me was the collaborative environments, “online spaces where the focus is on making it easy to collaborate and work in groups, no matter where the participants may be” (2010 Horizon Report: K12 Edition). As stated in the 2010 Horizon report, “The value placed on collaboration in the workplace is high, and professionals of all kinds are expected to work across geographic and cultural boundaries more and more frequently.” We need to be supporting the development of students' ability to collaborate using technology, as well as face-to-face. In addition, collaboration with students and individuals from other schools or countries expose learners to different perspectives they might not otherwise be exposed to in the classroom.

During my student teaching experience, I used a few of the technologies mentioned in the Horizon Report, including VoiceThreads and Google Docs. However, my use of them was limited to the students using the applications to create group presentations. After reading the Horizon Report, I would like to try using one of these collaborative environment technologies to have students from my school collaborate with students at other schools in the district, state, country, or world to complete a community/global service initiative or research project pertaining to one of the content threads of the science curriculum. I believe such a project would help students build communication skills, collaborative skills, critical thinking skills, as well as expose them to other perspectives and help them release the synergy of collaborative work on a large-scale.

Technology is an area that we cannot ignore as educators and I plan to continue reading the Horizon Reports as one means to personally stay abreast of this issue and learn about new applications to bring into the classroom.

http://wp.nmc.org/horizon-k12-2010/

Improving Teacher Effectiveness: Professional Learning Communities

While reflecting and writing my professional development plan, I had an interesting article land in my email from NSTA (National Science Teachers Association) pertaining to the matter called “STEM Teachers in Professional Learning Communities: From Good Teachers to Great Teaching” released by The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) (http://www.nctaf.org/documents/NCTAFreportSTEMTeachersinPLCsFromGoodTeacherstoGreatTeaching.pdf). The report summarizes a two-year National Science Foundation (NSF) funded study called STEM Teachers in Professional Learning Communities: A Knowledge Synthesis (“Knowledge Synthesis”). This teacher effectiveness and professional development study, which analyzed nearly two hundred research articles and reports, concluded that professional learning communities (PLCs) (collaborative learning teams of educators) have significant positive impacts on teacher practice. More specifically, the study found that:

• Participating in learning teams can successfully engage teachers in discussions about the subjects that they teach.
• Teachers participating in PLCs better understood the content and felt more prepared to teach the content.
• Teachers participating in PLCs improved their practice by using more research-based methods, “paying more attention to students’ reasoning and understanding, and using more diverse modes of engaging students in problem solving.”

As far as the effects of PLCs on student achievement, the verdict is still out. NCTAF reported that the research in this area is just emerging. However, existing studies show positive effects. In any case, this research indicates that PLCs have significant impacts on professional development and a more wide-spread use of PLCs could help improve education and make our country more competitive on a global scale.

            There were a few quotes from the article that spoke so strongly about the necessity for collaboration between educators that I must share them here.

We now have compelling evidence that when teachers team up with their colleagues they are able to create a culture of success in schools, leading to teaching improvements and student learning gains. The clear policy and practice implication is that great teaching is a team sport. Performance appraisal, compensation, and incentive systems that focus on individual teacher efforts at the expense of collaborative professional capacity building could seriously undermine our ability to prepare today’s students for 21 st century college and career success. Every school needs good teachers—but a school does not become a great place to learn until those teachers have the leadership and support to create a learning culture that is more powerful than even the best of them can sustain on their own.

To meet the needs of today’s learners, the tradition of artisan teaching in solo‐practice classrooms will have to give way to a school culture in which teachers continuously develop their content knowledge and pedagogical skills through collaborative practice that is embedded in the daily fabric of their work. Teacher collaboration supports student learning, and the good news is that teachers who work in strong learning communities are more satisfied with their careers and are more likely to remain in teaching long enough to become accomplished educators.

            This article particularly caught my attention because it was one of my professional development goals to form a collaborative relationship with one or more teachers for peer evaluation and a spring board for ideas. This article supports the need for me to fulfill this goal and aspires me to reach another goal, to develop and implement PLCs in the school(s) where I teach.

In reflecting on this study, it also struck me as ironic that there is currently a big push for collaborative learning in the classroom, yet teachers are not doing the same. The synergy of collaborative educators is not being realized. Improving teaching quality is the single most important investment we can make to prepare today’s students for college and career success and research has shown that PLCs improve teacher effectiveness. We need to work together to ensure that every child is prepared for life.

Check out the article!

http://www.nctaf.org/documents/NCTAFreportSTEMTeachersinPLCsFromGoodTeacherstoGreatTeaching.pdf