Instructional Planning, Lesson Delivery, and Focus for Learning

The standards represented here are:
Standard 2: Content
Standard 4: Instruction
Standard 6: Collaboration and Communication

Allow me to set the stage.  I teach in an urban middle school with 450 students from all over the city.  Some come from families who carefully scrutinized their middle school choice options, deciding on STEM education as the best delivery method for their child.  Some chose my school because they liked the aesthetics of our building the most.  Others chose my school because we are within walking distance.  Some students have been with us for all three years of middle school.  Others have moved in and out of state many times, and we are but one stop on their educational rollercoaster.  This is the reality of urban education.  Regardless, they all deserve the best education possible, which happens to be my specialty ;-)

Instructional Planning and Focus for Learning

My goal has always been to teach kids with such vigor, relevancy, and effectiveness that they grow up to become happy, productive members of society.  With this in mind, my instructional planning and focus always lead back to the essential question, " What do students need to know and be able to do to be happy, productive members of society?"  I incorporate critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity as much as humanly possible.  With that, I strive to make meaningful career connections with my curriculum so students can see the bridge between what they are doing now and how it is applicable to real jobs.

Problem-Based Learning

I am quite passionate about problem-based learning, or PBL.  I find that this method of instruction offers the students an opportunity to make real-world meaningful connections.  I have implemented countless PBLs in my classroom.  My first was a PBL that required students to create commercials for local downtown businesses.  Students worked through the design process, considered customer needs and restrictions, and used various apps and tech tools to make the commercials.  The students then presented their work to the business owners through an event we held downtown on the first Friday in May.

I have run a PBL on the zombie apocalypse many times.  I liked this one because it tied in with current pop culture when Walking Dead and other zombie movies were a popular show with the students.  Though I disguised it as survival for a zombie invasion, in reality, I used resources from the CDC for natural disasters and real-world applicable disaster preparations.  I also tied in science with parasitic species such as the brain-eating amoebas and Cordyceps fungus.

In honor of the passing of Gene Wilder, a colleague and I worked on a week-long PBL where students had to develop an artifact that would fit into the Cholocate Factory.  They practiced the design process, with the constraints being mathematical.

Another strangely interesting PBL that I have run is one on poop, which is gross yet fascinating! I challenged kids to consider how sanitation affects societies.  We studied the history of the toilet, the patent for toilet paper, and the different ways other cultures deal with "number 2."  We looked at the social issues surrounding sanitation in countries like India, where rape is an issue because women do not have access to indoor plumbing.  We looked at the cultural aspects of feces of animals, from the world's most expensive coffee being the feces of the Civit cat who likes to snack on coffee berries, to the Hindus who use cow feces to bless their homes and light their fires.  We ended this PBL with a tour to our local Stark Sanitation Department to see where the "poo" goes and how it's dealt with. 

WLE Full STEAMM Ahead

The Wheeling and Lake Erie Full STEAMM Ahead program was developed to allow our students to explore career options within the railway and transportation industries.  The transportation industry offers a variety of career paths, some that require further education and some that do not.  This career connection opportunity helps students understand why 21st-century skills being practiced in the classroom are applied in the real world.AHSM Cleveland Clinic

Professional Development:

I believe in the value of quality professional development.   I like to regulary attend webinars and conferences so I can stay up to date.  This month, I attended the EDTech Smackdown to learn about apps and programs to help with distance learning.

I also present at conferences.  I do this so I can share my planning, delivery, and focus for learning with other educators.  This month, I've facilitated adult learning opportunities in our district EdCamp.  I have also attended and presented at the Ohio Middle-Level Educators Association for the past two years.

Lesson Delivery

All Hail Google

One of my essential learning management systems is Google Classroom.  I detest papers, and admittedly, I am not the best of keeping track of those papers, so Google Classroom is a blessing!  Student assignments can be sorted, scheduled, graded, revised, shared, submitted, and reviewed all with a few mouse clicks.  I use Google Classroom daily regardless of the classroom task at hand, as a way to keep myself on track, a way for absent students to know what they missed, a way for intervention specialists to know what's going on inside my four crazy walls, and a way for parents to know what learning is taking place when their child offers that true-to-adolescence dinner time response for "What did you do in school today, honey?"

Peardeck

Peardeck is another one of my favorites.  I use Peardeck as an extension of my classroom slideshow presentation.  Peardesk allows for students to interact with the lesson presentation from their devices, and it allows them to have a copy of the presentation on that device.  Furthermore, it helps with focus as it will flip to the next slide in tandem with my flipping on the big screen.  Peardeck allows me to ask impromptu formative assessment questions to check for understanding before I move on with the topic.  It allows students to provide feedback as to what's happening in the classroom, and it offers them an opportunity to take ownership of their learning.  Peardeck integrates seamlessly with Google and Microsoft products.

Nearpod

Nearpod is also a favorite for lesson delivery.  I like to use Nearpod at the beginning of a unit or section when I have new concepts to introduce to the kids.  Nearpod makes it very easy to spice up a traditional boring teacher-led lesson.  This platform allows me to embed just about anything I can think of, attach questions, polls, quizzes, writing assignments, etc, and grade all that with ease.  Nearpod is like Peardeck in that students can be given a code to access and follow in sync while in the classroom.  It can also be used asynchronously when, let's say, a pandemic breaks out and school is canceled for two months and everyone have to hastily transition to distance learning ;-)

Here is an example lesson I used during our COVID-19 quarantine.

In the screenshot below, you can see that, not only does Nearpod neatly store my lessons, but it also provides opportunities to share lessons within the school library link on the left.  Additionally, there's a handy section for substitute teacher plans.  The Nearpod Lesson Library offers thousands of lessons that can be searched for efficiently, previewed, and customized to meet my specific learning targets.

White Coat

I Teach Programming to Middle School Kids and I am Good at it :-)

Code.Org

Code Combat

Whole Child Learning

PBL and Interdisciplinary

...and newly added... Distance Learning

Here is a COVID-19 lesson delivery example that my colleagues and I developed during the quarantine.  The idea behind the one slideshow delivery system was familiar to me, as it was. how I like to keep myself organized when we were "old school" face to face ;-). In this slideshow, student have access to assignments from all subjects for the grade band.  Students complete slide assignments based on their class schedules when we went into quarantine.  I quickly became proficient in Google Meet, and hold regularly scheduled office hours along with impromptu help sessions when needed.

Slide 18 contains my lesson links.  There, I offer students an opportunity to explore current events that are being impacted by biomedical engineering and computer science alike.  Students explore the website developed by John Hopkins that tracks the spread of the pandemic, just as we did beginning in January when word began to circulate that a new disease was threatening our way of life.  The next section offers a chance to continue practicing computer programming in Python with Code Combat.  The last section revisits an assignment from week 1 of quarantine which is a design challenge from a site called Future Engineers.  Students are tasked with creating a plan to make someone smile while still following social distancing rules.  After reviewing submissions for the first week, I decided it best to spiral back to this lesson, as week one was a daunting transition for most of our students, with adjusting to the new norm and parents losing jobs and finding a reliable device for which to use for online instruction.

One can also see on my slide 18 that I choose not to punish those who are previously finished with yet more work.  This is in honor of the promise I made to my husband when I became a teacher.  My husband recalled his middle school experience with a groan, having entered the CHAP program for gifted and talented youth at that time.  He reflects on the heartbreak it caused him, having been given copious amounts of work instead of higher ability work while in the program.

Resources

Computer Science Standards