hello! the second post of the night, i think i'm too wiped-out to do much more than sit and meditate on the last week gone by - which has been all school, all the time. there haven't been any free hours to go get my hands dirty and my head confused in thoughts of bigger bangladesh this week.
so! this school has regular professional development workshops. for two solid days each semester the students are kicked out and the teachers take their place, while expert educators from somewhere are flown in to teach us. then, after the two days, you have the option of extending your time in the workshop for 6 more days with the benefit of earning 3 credits toward a master's degree or doctorate - hosted by SUNY Buffalo. the real selling point is this: school pays for it! and they (mr. Plotkin, our great superintendent) agreed to pay for the interns to take the course too. and so for the last full week i've been sitting in some long days of class. since sunday we've been teaching normal school hours and then going to class right after the last bell rings. the classes are generally taught by accomplished people in the field of education. this time around, Bill Powell and Ochan Kosuma-Powell came in to teach a course on Differentiation (which is the broad idea of teaching to meet the readiness levels and interests/aptitudes of diverse learners in a given classroom). These two are a husband-wife team, and they are the leading experts education in international schools. The U.S. state department buys their materials for all the embassy schools worldwide, and so on. They have been AWESOME in presenting an intensive and worthwhile course for us. It has been a hyper-interactive recap of my two years of ed school in just one week's time. I've got one more day to go, and I'm coming out of this class feeling very centered in good education practices. These paid-for courses are another way that the international school community takes good care of its teachers. And it obviously makes for a very professional faculty team; many of our teachers are very progressive and really do teach according to best-researched practices. Most all faculty members at AISD have their master's degree and are working on a second one or on their doctorate - slowly over time, and on the school's wallet.
It just so happens that UVA and the Curry School are the biggest experts on differentiation out there today, and that is the flat truth of it. UVA has Professor Carole Anne Tomlinson, who is the big, big name researching and teaching on the subject. Articles by Carole Anne have been a big chunk of our reading material for the course this week. And yes it feels too cool to be identified with UVA when all these teachers are hanging out in Bangladesh and reading Carole Anne's stuff.
But even more cool happened 3 days ago, when we watched a video of a model "differentiated" high school classroom in action, and the classroom out of Charlottesville High School in the last year. Holy cow. In fact, we watched a 45-minute video on one of my colleagues from student teaching last fall, 9th grade history teacher Chad Prather (who is also a Curry grad!). He's doing amazing things, with a big initiative to collapse readiness-level tracking in the 9th-grade. For those of you familiar with CHS, you know there are big racial and economic divides among the student population, which translates to a stark divide in the student body as it is tracked into high and low. Chad has done something big to bring them closer together. I have substitute-taught for him, and I knew a bunch of the kids in the video. So, sitting in Dhaka, I was just beaming - I couldn't help it - it was really cool to see this. I'm starting to wonder if CHS might need some good new teachers to help implement their program at a broader scale, say, next year.... I'm sure that many US public schools are needing similar efforts.
I know, when I finally sit down to type it all comes out in such massive quantities. But this blogging, articulating, actually feels so good sometimes.
There's a lot to learn here, because what I was saying early on has proven to be true: AISD is a best-practice school. In the middle school they are not teaching to any tests, but rather teaching though big global understandings, student reflection, aligned assessments, authentic and project-based learning, social and emotional learning, and lots of other ed-school techniques that work well with emerging brain science about learning. I like what I'm seeing in the middle school: big engaging projects that stress essential skills and organization... I keep thinking of how this sort of teaching is very appropriate for the struggling kids I was working with at CHS last fall, who had such poor school skills. This kind of teaching would engage them in important questions and critical thinking, but give non-traditional ways of interacting with the material - it's a much less conventional, more creative, and more applied approach than much of what I've seen out there. So, like I was saying earlier, I'm looking forward to putting all these ideas into action next year.
And in the mean time, to sum up this long blog post, and to encourage you all who made it to the end of this if there are any such patient souls, i have this advice:
you guys should know that 7th grade is the most awkward, out of place year in anyone's life and if you're ever finding yourself feeling down then just remember that at least you are not a 7th grader, who it's hard for even the most open-hearted intern teacher to love for a sustained 90-minute period.
