#MTBoSYuleBlog - Something I Still Want to Try...

 

Something I Still Want to Try This Year...

This year has been a huge time of change for me.  Beyond just changing schools, I also went from teaching juniors and seniors to teaching freshman and sophomores.  To be honest, this is the first year in my career that I've ever taught freshman!  I also changed from teaching elective classes to teaching Geometry all day, which brings its own set of challenges!

Like most of the #MTBoS, one of the books I read this past spring / summer was Building Thinking Classrooms.  I had first been introduced to Peter Liljedahl's work with Vertical Non-Permanent Surfaces (VNPS) and Visible Random Grouping (VRG) back at TMC14, so when his book came out this past year, it was definitely on my must-read list.  

If you are looking for a professional read, this is definitely one I recommend!  The book is very readable and walks you through the research that Peter did around the 14 strategies in the book.  When I first read the book in the spring, I was enthralled with the idea of the Thinking Classroom and having my students up on the boards.  I had used whiteboards regularly until COVID protocols prevented us from shared supplies and I was so eager to get back to using them regularly!  I listed to podcasts, participated in book chats and Zoom meetings, and joined the Facebook group.  I was researching curricular and non-curricular tasks.  I read the book a second time and took detailed notes.

I won a set of Wipebook flipcharts on a giveaway and excitedly mounted them to my classroom walls.  I was ready - bring on the new school year!!

Then, reality hit.  Here I am, in a new school, teaching underclassmen, teaching Geometry all day, learning a new system, and I just couldn't do it (YET).  

The toll of the 2020-2021 school year hit me like a ton of bricks.  Issues I didn't anticipate prevented me from having the courage and energy to try the BTC model.  I knew I was at a disadvantage as the "new teacher" because I had lost the luxury of having a reputation with my admin and the community.  But what I didn't realize was that learning how to teach in-person again would be such a challenge.  I was dealing with classroom management issues unlike any I'd dealt with before.  There were gaps of knowledge from the disrupted learning of the past 1.5 years that at times felt unsurmountable. 

So I decided to put my BTC goals on the backburner for a while and focus on building the relationship and trust that I needed with my students.  While I'm not proud of it, I had to promote some "mimicking" behaviors to help students re-learn how to be students again.  For many of them, they felt "on their own" last year and I needed to get them to trust me that I would always have their best interests at heart.  I also needed this time to learn the ropes of a new system, to realign my expectations to my reality, to re-learn how to teach and engage students.  

At the beginning of the year, I felt like I was running around the room constantly as kiddos screamed my name for help / attention.  But as our classroom community grew, the kiddos were better about turning to each other rather than straight to me.  They got better about pulling out their whiteboards to do their work rather than trying to do it all in their heads.  As our relationships have developed and students are used to being in a classroom again, some of the management issues have decreased (thankfully!)

BTC is still something I want to try, although I'll be honest that I'm still not sure what it would look like in a Geometry class.  I'm still not 100% positive how to "thin-slice" the curriculum in a way that makes sense and promotes thinking.  I still have some kiddos that just have personalities that cannot be together.  I don't know how well my own personality will do with the chaos of having kids around the classroom all hour.  But like everything, it's about baby steps, so I want to try to get the kiddos up on the boards at least once or twice in January and we'll go from there.