I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.
Claire Miles | Passionate Educator. Lifelong Learner.
My Teaching Journey
“Well...now what?” I remember asking myself when I got my first teaching job offer. Everything I had learned throughout my time in Michigan State University’s College of Education had led me to this point. Suddenly, all of the knowledge from my classes and projects I had worked so hard on seemed to disappear. I froze up. Thankfully after going through my new classroom, and reviewing my school’s curriculum, these ideas started coming back to me. This frozen, anxious feeling seemed to thaw back into a state of excitement and readiness by the time the first day of school came around. Immediately, I fell in love with having my own students and my very own classroom. It was much more than a work space; it became my second home.
As most first years of teaching go, the year was filled with excitement and newness. However, I did not escape the many challenges that typically come up as one grapples with the many tasks at hand. I found myself thinking, “how can I possibly fit all of this curriculum in?” and “what did my professors say about creating engaging lesson plans while also managing a whole classroom of third graders?”. As the year unfolded, I struggled to figure out strategies that worked for me and my students. It was messy, but it was beautiful. I loved that first class of third graders.
A few years have passed now, and I have started to find my niche. I decided it was time to pursue my Master’s degree in Education. My goal was to continue to grow as a lifelong learner, and establish the best teaching practices into my own classroom. I have also considered becoming a reading interventionist instead of a general education classroom teacher. Therefore, I started to look into Michigan State’s Literacy Education program. In addition, with the third grade reading law being put into place, even though I teach at a private school, I saw the importance of helping my third graders reach a level of reading proficiency. I needed them to be confident in their reading, so that they continued to love and thrive in school in the coming years. That desire to help students fall in love with reading so that they could find success, and the possibility of being able to become a reading interventionist were the two deciding factors that solidified my decision to study literacy education.
Planning For Success
I had officially started my master’s degree during the fall of 2015 during my student teaching. However, after settling into my professional career, I decided to continue on with this literacy program in the fall of 2018. One of the first classes that MSU required for my degree was Education (ED) 800, a class on Educational Inquiry. Here, we studied various ways other educators think about education. This is all to understand why we do what we do, arguably the most important question any teacher can ask his or herself. Although I didn’t totally see the value of this class at the time, looking back, it provided the foundation I needed to look further into my own current teaching practices.
There were many more influential courses that I took throughout my time in Michigan State University’s (MSU) Master’s of Arts in Education (MAED) program. MSU professors helped me see the value of using data driven instruction, with the proper use of assessments and rubrics. I also learned more about dealing with challenging behaviors in the classroom. Thankfully, I was able to immediately implement many of these tools as I was still teaching full time, and taking these classes online.
Finding a Voice in Writing
During my first three years of teaching, I struggled with ways to creatively teach writing. My school does not have a great curriculum to follow like my student teaching did, and I found myself lost with what to do. Therefore, writing started getting pushed back behind all of the other teaching requirements. Finally, after three years, I decided to make a choice. I was going to make a huge effort to make a significant amount of time every day for my students to write. In order to do this, I needed some support from other teaching professionals. It was then that I signed up to take Teacher Education (TE) 848- Writing Assessment and Instruction with Raven Jones. My hope was that I would learn enough teaching writing strategies that I could share back at school, and then we could all be more intentional about sharing the love of writing
with our students.
TE 848 covered the best practices for teaching writing. Included in this course’s
objectives were how to use assessments to help young writers grow, and how to
inspire students to write by giving them authentic experiences. We had many
discussions about how overusing assessments could potentially discourage
young writers from developing their own voice. Therefore, I learned how to
balance the use of assessments to guide my instruction, but not stifle any
creativity. I became confident at teaching and assessing using writing traits,
self assessment, peer editing, and student-teacher conferences.
As my final project, I was inspired to write a letter to my principal about what writing rubrics we should be using, and how they should be used appropriately. I then created a lesson plan of a writing project geared towards third grade. This included specific assessments that I would use, as well as their rationales. For this particular assignment that I created, I had my students write about animal adaptations. I carefully aligned this objective with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and our Diocese of Lansing (DOL) standards. I made it my goal to start with an engaging and meaningful activity which ended up being a week long of animal observations at our local zoo. Students would then use these observations to think more deeply about whether their animal could live in any other habitat or not. Throughout the writing process, students would be given rubrics on both content and quality of writing using the six traits. Then, they would learn how to edit their own writing, as well as participate in peer and teacher review sessions. I found all of these best teaching practices extremely effective in my own classroom, and plan on continuing to use similar structure in my writing units in the future.
Read. Lead. Succeed.
As I previously stated, my school and classes encouraged me to provide data driven instruction, therefore, in conjunction with the writing rubrics that I learned to use, I wanted to also become proficient at using reading assessments to guide my daily small group reading instruction. Then I would finally feel like I was making the best use of time in these guided reading groups. Therefore, I signed up to take Teacher Education (TE) 842- Elementary Reading Assessment and Instruction with Blythe Anderson. I was hopeful that I would gather enough tools in this class to make my small group time much more intentional, focused, and meaningful.
TE 842 focused on today's best practices in reading instruction. Part of this instruction includes different types of assessments that teachers can use to help drive their reading instruction. Throughout this class, I worked with a focal student in my class, and used these new assessments to create individual learning objectives for him. Then I used my knowledge of today's best teaching practices to instruct them in this area. Specifically, my student Robert was struggling with comprehension. Therefore, I used word lists and appropriate leveled Quality Reading Inventories (QRI’s) to find the holes in his comprehension. Once I identified these areas of growth, I put together three lesson plans to help fill in these gaps. I taught Robert how to use his five fingers to retell me expository (non-fiction) writing; I also found that he was struggling with some of the vocabulary in the expository writing, so I taught him how to identify words he does not know, and how to look them up in a dictionary. According to my post assessment, these few strategies that I reviewed with Robert helped him grow in comprehension of expository writing. They increased his vocabulary score, and his retelling score. I believe that next, I would be able to help him infer information throughout the text as well. Then, I will be able to use similar strategies to help future struggling readers in my class which is a goal I continue to have going forward.
Throughout the same course, I also participated in a book club which studied project based learning (PBL). This is a wonderful teaching style that fully engages students with authentic learning experiences. An example of project based learning that I then used in my own classroom was for my students to make informational booklets about Native Americans for the local museum. The authentic task and opportunity to help educate others at the museum significantly increased my student’s motivation to read, research, and write which was exactly what I needed to liven up my literacy instruction. I also anticipate incorporating more project based instruction into a few of my units which can be in any subject!
Embracing Challenging Behaviors With Love
Finally, although I was heavily focused on literacy, I was able to take a few electives through MSU’s MAED program. My all-time favorite class was Teacher Education (TE) 832- Educating Students with Challenging Behavior with Dr. Vasiliki Mousouli. This class focused on managing today's toughest behaviors that one might see in the classroom.
I was so excited to begin this class, as I was never able to take a class before that
focused solely on classroom management, and especially the most difficult behaviors.
I was so hopeful that I would be able to take these strategies right back into my own
classroom and put them to use with a few behaviors that I was struggling with at
the time.
Throughout the semester, we discussed what these behaviors might look like, the
cause for them, and then the best way to help these students. The biggest take away
that I had was to always find the root of the problem. Throughout the class I worked
with a focal student, Henry, who struggled with impulsive behaviors. I then created a
plan for him to check in with me and work towards points to help complete his work.
I found that he made huge strides as he worked for points that would go towards his classroom money. He also had a much higher completion rate when I gave him a checklist of activities to complete. He became very proud of checking all of the boxes. I also developed weekly parent communication for accountability which helped with consistency in the home and at school for Henry. I am super proud of the progress I was able to make with Henry, and plan on using similar strategies in the future.
Looking With Bright Eyes Into The Future
These three classes helped me move from an excited teacher who was just trying to get by, to a more mature and experienced educator in literacy and behavior management. I can confidently say that I will be able to take what I learned and become a leader within my own school in literacy, and even with difficult behaviors. Specifically, I would like to join my school’s writing committee, and introduce these new rubrics to my coworkers. I hope that we can all become uniform in using these rubrics effectively. I also hope to inspire those within my professional network to continue thinking about their own educational practices in reading so that we can continue to provide the best teaching instruction to our beloved students in whole groups and small groups. Finally, I am really excited to be able to use my tips and tricks that I learned about dealing with challenging behavior. I also look forward to welcoming other teachers into my classroom as they struggle with behaviors, so that I can pass along my newfound knowledge.
I am so thankful for my time in the MAED program at Michigan State University. It has challenged me to become a more intentional literacy teacher. It has also challenged me to get to the root cause of challenging behaviors. I look forward to implementing my newfound knowledge in my classroom, and sharing these best practices with my growing teaching network. Afterall, Nelson Mandela says that “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Let’s do it!
All photos on this page are free Wix images.