ENTRY 5: REFLECTIONS ON STUDENT MEETINGS
Description of Entry:
This artifact is a series of reflections on meetings that were focused on the progress of students. The first reflection was on a meeting I attended after school with my cooperating teacher and the science, language arts, and social studies teachers on my team. We discussed issues regarding our students, such as focuses of concern, needs of special education students, and consistency of classroom rules.
The second is a reflection on my first parent-teacher conference. The meeting included the student, his mother, the sixth grade counselor, and all the teachers on the team. In my reflection, I discussed the ways that the teachers communicated during the meeting. I found those techniques both interesting and effective. After attending so many parent-teacher conferences, I collected my thoughts on what I had learned from them in my third reflection. In this set of notes, I described what occurred during a typical conference as well as some things I learned from the experiences.
The fourth is a set of notes I wrote down during an IEP meeting for one of my students. He is an honors student with ADHD and has physical difficulty with writing. This was a problem because the math curriculum required a lot of written explanation. During the meeting, his parents and I agreed to have him work on one of the class’ computers for these types of assignments. I also made my worksheets (which I created on Microsoft Word) available to him on disk, making it easier for him to complete. Additionally, the teachers agreed to be flexible with his due dates, because it is very difficult for him to work in the evening when his medication wears off.
Program Goals and Targets:
By making worksheets available on computer disk, allowing the use of a computer in class, and adjusting due dates, I demonstrate my ability to meet the needs of diverse learners (2B). By participating in conferences to support student development, and evaluate and plan for their on-going needs, I demonstrate my ability to assess development (2D). I demonstrate teamwork with colleagues (4A) by participating as an effective team member in meetings and conferences. And by developing working relationships with parents, I demonstrate my community relationships (4B).
Reflection:
One of my favorite aspects of student teaching at Eckstein Middle School was the organization of interdisciplinary teaming. At the sixth grade level, each team is comprised of language arts, social studies, science, and math teachers. Each team of teachers has the same daily planning period, encouraging collaboration. Sixth graders are divided into three groups and assigned to one of these teams. Thus, each group of students has the same teachers for their core classes.
There are several strong theoretical arguments for the implementation of teaming. One of these is that it gives students the feeling of a smaller, more personal community. In middle school, they interact with thirty different students per class, in a number of different periods. Without teaming, it would be nearly impossible for students to build relationships with their peers. The structural organization of teaming allows students to have all of their core classes with others from the same team. The result is that they are in contact with the same group of students throughout the day.
Teaming also offers teachers the opportunities to work collaboratively. Ideally, teachers would “not only coordinate content but also jointly address problems and needs of individual students, meet with parents, revise schedules for classes that need more time, group and regroup students to match lessons to abilities, and plan assemblies, trips, and other special events” (Arhar, 1992, p. 151). Because team teachers share a common planning period, these are much more likely to occur.
While there are strong theoretical rationales for interdisciplinary teams, Arhar and her colleagues (1989) remind us that “teaming creates an opportunity for things to be done differently in the school; it does not assure that they will… no organizational practice can guarantee that its major tenets will be implemented if the implementation depends upon the idiosyncratic decision of members of the organization to participate” (p. 24). Thus, teaming may encourage teachers to collaborate, but it does not mean that such collaboration will occur. In addition, researchers have attempted to study the effects of teaming on student learning, resulting in several conflicting reports and an inconclusive result (Arhar, Johnston, & Markle, 1989).
Historically, schools were little houses in small communities. However, as the decades passed, schools grew much larger in size. In his historical review of education, Marshak (1995) stated that schools with larger populations were created so that “schools could offer a diversified and comprehensive curriculum at an affordable price” (p. 31). While creating these larger schools did create opportunities to teach other subjects, it resulted in the transformation of the school environment. They went from small, intimate settings to large, impersonal ones. Nothing was done to adjust students to this environmental change, even though students perform better as members of a smaller learning community (McPartland, Jordan, Legters, & Balfanz, 1997; Marshak, 1995). Interdisciplinary teaming addresses this problem by breaking up large schools to create such communities.
Return to Portfolio