Burning Question Final Reflection by Bird

I entered Summer Institute with a multitude of questions. How can I become more technologically savvy? How can I engage my students more? What is wrong with my curriculum? How can I stop feeling so frustrated with myself and with my students? How can I learn about the profession of teaching through a philosophy that reflects my beliefs? How can I learn some of the professional vocabulary that I have never been exposed to so that I sound like I know what I am talking about? I wanted the common language that all teachers use to discuss theory and practice. This was a lot more than just one burning question.

I began by trying to narrow down these questions by trying to find commonalities between the topics and finding what was being answered through the curriculum of Summer Institute, I slowly began to chisel away at the gigantic boulder that had been weighing me down. Specifically, Google Docs became my new best friend. He taught me how to blog and how to use him as a tool to keep myself and my students more organized and have less clutter. I learned about the write-talk-write method, found it to be personally and professionally fulfilling, so I began to restructure my curriculum to integrate more of these strategies. I stopped and asked myself- what is working in my classroom, what is not, and what power do I have to change it? I sorted though the body of my curricula and decided that my skeleton needed to be reconstructed with a 3D printer. I needed a better framework to hang all of the different systems that I taught. My bones would be build through my writing program. I was finally able to focus my burning question onto my writing journals and independent reading program. By this time, it was the middle of Summer Institute. I had finally stopped feeling like I had a tangled ball of string that I was desperately trying to unravel, but could never find the end, only more pieces. Through mentoring, conferencing, reading, participating in demos, and listening to stories of other teachers, I formulated a plan on how to set up writing logs for each of my classes: social studies, science, and ELA. I reflected on the problems I had in the past with my classroom journals and what I wanted them to look like this coming school year. I chucked out junk that was not working with wild abandonment. I redesigned my supply list for my students and began to explore more multi-modalities to use as texts and learning strategies for my students. I will be designing the strategy list and the rules for each book during the rest of my summer while I redesign my reading program to reflect more independent reading instead of book clubs. I know that my students will want to be able voice their opinions on the curriculum changes (excellent authentic persuasive writing time!) and we will reflect on them together in class using the write-talk-write model. I will probably be making adjustments after eight weeks of trying out our new system (if not sooner!). It is an organic process that will happen with both parties involved. I will ask them: what is working, what doesn't work, and what would you suggest? My goal is to keep writing about the process of these changes, taking notes on how the new ideas work and observing my students' reactions to the new learning styles. I will also chart if my changes to my curricula addressed my questions from the beginning of SI.