2017 Goal Reflections

Goal Reflection 2016-17

Please complete this template as a BLOG post concerning your professional goals. Feel free to include links or photos of supporting materials/artifacts that help provide insight or reflection on your goals. (ex- student work, photos, journal entry, etc.) Thank you.  

Teacher name: Trevor Putvain Date: 4/25/17

1. Please list some highlights or discoveries that happened this year as you tried to achieve your goals?

2. How do you assess/ know your progress? What evidence do you have? Describe the things you did and/or things that were obstacles for you along the way that helped you meet your professional goal(s). You can reference your previous BLOG posts here and do not need to repeat something that you already wrote.

3. What things helped you reach your goals and what other supports do you wish you had to help you move toward your goals this year and next year if you are considering continuing with the same goal?

4. Do your reflections provide any insights or thoughts about goals for next year?  

Goal One: This year I will work towards aligning old work habit expectations to the new Scholarly Habits scales.  

Overall - I would say this did not go as smooth as I had hoped back in September.  Here are some insights I have gained along the way though.  

• The language of the Scholarly Habits were a real logistical issue. It was just impossible to isolate one particular goal or have uniform language across the scale that was useful to students.  That made it very frustrating for students to use them and to create rubrics in Schoology to actually be able to track them.  I think the work we are doing on the rewrite team though should help to rectify this issue for next year.  
• I dealt throughout the year with the issue of to what extent the scholarly habits should be “graded”.   I started out in the camp of giving as many of them mastery grades as possible but am coming around to be more comfortable with them not being graded.  I am also much more comfortable with having students record their own performance.  Most often they are right where I am at and when we aren’t on the same page we can have a conversation about it.  But, there needs to be a way to track student progress even if it does not work into a grade.  I hoping that next year we will have scales created in Schoology that will allow us to record this information.  
• My highpoint came recently when I gave 9th grade students an essay assignment and saw completely different reactions to how they approached the assignment.  By April I could see those in class who read the instructions and new right what to do with it.  Then there were the students who just put their head down on their desk.  In a 30 second scan of the room I knew those students who were going to make proficiency at the end of the year and those that wouldn’t.  It was very powerful visual evidence.  So I pulled out my SH to see what language fit this. I tweaked some language to make it meaningful and the next day I had created this reflection part to the assignment and we spent an entire class discussing what evidence of “responsibility”  looks like.

Scholarly Habits:  

	I Can Transfer: Proficient with Distinction	I Can Do This: Proficient	Basic Proficiency	Making Progress	Getting Started
Responsibility Respectfully speak up for yourself as a learner; ask questions that will improve your learning	I independently seek challenge and use these challenges to improve my understanding and performance. In these challenges I seek feedback and revise work to improve my learning. I’ve got some ideas about how I could make this even more challenging for myself.	I seek feedback and repeat my efforts, practicing until I can demonstrate understanding and proficiency in the task at hand. I know there are multiple strategies toward success and am willing to try them. I want to improve and am ready to use what I’ve learned to do it on my own.	I work to improve my understanding and performance even when material is difficult. I take opportunities to seek feedback and revise work. I take advantage of supports provided and work toward a goal of independence. I want to improve and I’m going to ask for lots of help to get there	I want to improve my understanding and performance even when material is difficult. I sometimes take opportunities to seek feedback and revise work. I sometimes take advantage of supports provided. I’ll give it a try - but I’m not really interested in improving my abilities	I understand that academic growth means challenging myself and making efforts to progress.   I recognize that class time is a place for learning and I know where I have been given resources and supports to help me learn. I don’t know where to start and I’m hoping this will all just go away

Highlight in red where you think you were at when you first received this assignment.  

  Where you marked yourself is your claim.  Now provide me with 2-3 pieces of evidence that proves that is where you are at.  What does that look like?  

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When you have finished,  remark yourself in blue.  

Again - give me 2-3 pieces of evidence that you could capture to back up your claim.  

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Some highlights from the activity

1. It was much more meaningful for students when they had a specific assignment to think about their reactions to.  Many of them remarked that when they had picked a goal in TA they were just saying they were totally proficient at this.  But when they thought about how they were approaching this assignment they could see where they truly were.  
2. One of the standards we’ve been working with all year was using evidence to support claims.  I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this could just be another exercise that.  It made it much more meaningful to students when they realized their comments like “can we go outside today” was evidence that they were not proficient at taking responsibility to get things done.  

Finally - I took this to the next step in the next major project by giving students three different SH’s to choose from.  Rome Project Scholarly Habits

Goal Two: I will align learning objectives for each unit and the entire World History 1 course with the now available MRG’s and Global Citizen Grad Proficiencies.

At the outset of the year, the plan in our heads was that we would be able to identify a distinct GP for each unit in WH1 to be the theme for that unit.  For the first 3 units that worked out ok and I was able to rewrite the curriculum and learning scales for those.  But as we worked further into the year, I think what we found as a department is that it didn’t necessarily always work out that simple.  Not every unit of study as we traditionally define it (Greece, Rome) conveniently work into just one GP.  We also started to realize by mid year that just because we picked on GP to focus on per unit that the results did not show that all students had reached proficiency in it and how were we to now come back to it and allow students more practice.  

What is becoming more clear are what GP’s are being universally hit throughout the course and that this is what the course is really truly about.  These are tending to be less of the GP’s around Geography, Economics, Conflict, and Government - and more the Historical Thinking and Historical Literacy skills.  

Overall, I think I am feeling that the entire WH1 and 9th grade curriculum needs to be started over from scratch.  If the goal of the year was to align the current GP’s to the WH1 curriculum, it really should have been to see how we align a 9th grade curriculum to the current GP’s.  This is a discussion that we are going to have as a department starting next week.  

Overall Yearly Reflection:

Although slightly more sane than last year, this was another incredibly busy year.  The opportunity to sit back and reflect now on these goals makes me realize how little time there was to reflect on and alter practice.  I’m just too busy.  Each day is a race against the clock to prepare for classes, assess work for 80 students a day, etc.  And should a moment come when I don’t have something that immediately needs doing - I am too exhausted to think straight.  As I write this, I have 60 essays submitted by 9th graders that will take me all of my prep time for the next 3 days to go through.  I have 11 hours of phone calls to complete with my online students in the next two weeks.  The time to focus on goals and practice is not there.  I know that I need to reinvent things, like the 9th grade curriculum and had the best intentions to do that.  But I can’t believe that its May already and I feel like it was just another year of trying to survive each week.