A few months ago, I started seeing teachers posting anecdotes online under the title, “Evaluate This!” in response to the current practice of evaluating teachers, even those who don’t teach in tested subjects, on the standardized (English and Math) test scores of students. Teachers and students are so much more than data points, and test […]
There is one teacher in my life who has played a tremendous role in my education, for she has been my teacher for over 20 years. When I was an undergrad in English Education at Eastern Michigan University, I had the great good fortune to have been scheduled into an English Methods class taught by […]
June 2014 It’s 12:35 on my 3rd day of summer break. I’m at school. I’m interviewing students, listening, trying to find out what kind of experiences they’ve had in my classroom, looking back at twenty years of teaching Adrian Maples. I’ve decided to start writing about it–a memoir–in parts–on a blog. I am so happy […]
I go to a lot of concerts. I LOVE live music and dancing, especially Cajun and Zydeco dancing. One time, I was seeing Terrance Simien at the Ark in Ann Arbor. I was on the dance floor, and I was getting DOWN, when Terrance turned his attention on me! First he started dancing with me, […]
One of the artifacts that has a lot of information in it is the document with my Daily Lesson plans. I make one Google document for each class for each trimester, and I project it on the screen each day, displaying the day’s learning goal, instructions, due dates, and announcements. I haven’t yet, but in […]
Artifact analysis is a big part of teacher research. As I was working on analyzing artifacts, I remembered that when I started doing teacher research, I wasn’t really sure what the term “artifact” meant. Since this series is in part a demonstration of the research process for teachers who are new to T-R, I thought […]
“What happens when I make Independent Reading a high priority in my classroom?” Now that I’ve considered the numbers of books my students have read, I’m wondering about what kinds of books they read. I get a second copy of the finished book lists and get out the highlighters. I brainstorm categories to look for […]
Research Memo 3: “What happens when I make Independent Reading a high priority in my classroom?” I copy my three Daily Lesson documents, one for each trimester of ELA9, into one document and begin to brainstorm concepts and themes I’m interested in excavating for and wondering how I might locate data on those topics. This […]
I started out with a giant pile of disorganized documents: lesson hand-outs, student work on assignments, my own work on assignments, posters, record-keeping documents, notes… And in an hour and fifteen minutes, I had the entire year’s worth of documents organized and ready for research. Now I will print out my daily lesson plans, which […]
June 12 2017 A Teacher Researcher Reflects on Year 1 with the MAISA Unit: Independent Reading This year was my first year with the MAISA curriculum. In fact, it was the district’s first year with ANY ELA curriculum; I have taught 23 years in a district where every ELA teacher could teach anything, in any […]
August 7, 2015
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