SOL Tuesday: Growth Through Reflection

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"A defining condition of being human is that 

we have to understand the meaning of our experience." 

Jack Mezirow 

Late last week I met with Mike, one of our building's associate principals, who is also my primary evaluator this year. As a part of our teacher effectiveness system in Wisconsin, I needed to reflect on how I grew as an educator this year. Below are two areas that I highlighted with Mike regarding my professional growth for the 2017-2018 school year:

Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA)

One of the most exciting, rewarding things that I worked on this year was learning more about and how to deliver RMA to a small group of high school students. (You can read more about my experience with RMA in this post and this post.) Although I discovered that it was not as easy to show student growth on standardized tests and grades using RMA, my students showed growth in reading through other measures such as the frequency of self-corrections, charting the quality of their miscues, and improvements in retelling. However, what stands out the most to me was the rich conversations that I had with my students while delivering RMA. I gleaned invaluable insights about reading as students explained their perspectives to me. In addition, based on student responses from the Burke Reading Interview (BRI), my students' perceptions of themselves as readers became more positive as the year progressed, and they reported employing more strategies as readers by the end of the year. 

A view into a conversation I had with one of my students immediately following an RMA conversation. 

Learning and delivering RMA also provided me with the opportunity to network with experts in the field, such as Dr. Cathy Compton-Lilly and Dr. Yang Wang, both Language and Literacy Professors from the University of South Carolina. I am incredibly grateful for how they helped guide me in how I could use RMA effectively with my high school learners. They patiently answered my questions, routinely shared professional articles, and assisted me in problem solving how I could effectively measure and report student growth using RMA. 

Overall, I am confident that I am a better teacher of readers because of the work I did with RMA this year. As a result of learning, delivering, and analyzing RMA, I now think in a much deeper way regarding the complexity of reading, especially in considering how readers make meaning. I am eager to continue to use RMA with my students next year. 

Building Positive Relationships 

In addition, a huge take away for me was a reminder of how important relationships are. I realized that building relationships is not a "one and done" first few weeks of school activity, like learning student names, or ice breakers. Intentional positive relationship building (and working on a positive classroom community) must occur all year. Through honest student conversations and reading student reflections, I realized how the lack of positive relationships/community is often what impedes learning in a classroom. (You can read some of my journey from the beginning of the year in this post.) Students were not able to engage in learning until there was trust established between teacher and that student. For this reason, I modeled my own thinking, reading, and writing more than I ever have with students in the past. 

A Heart Map I created with my students last week using the document camera. 

As a part of striving to build more positive student-teacher relationships, I used a lot of conferring with all of my students this year. (You can read a bit about my experience in conferring in this post.) Most of my students were not used to a teacher conferring with them individually, especially in reading and writing. This was rocky with all of my classes at the beginning of the school year, but I am glad that I continued to confer with my students. Eventually, conferring became normal in all of my classes. I discovered that conferring with all of my students gave me unique entry points that helped me get to know my students better as individuals and also as learners.

One of my most valuable tools: a notebook I used for daily conferring

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Blogging is one new way that I have reflected my growth as a teacher and learner this year. In fact, I was thrilled when I realized that I could use some of my writing as a part of my formal evaluation this year - so easy to embed links to show as artifacts. I anticipate that rereading my blog posts will continue to be a gauge for growth.  

Have you taken the time to reflect on the school year yet? How did you grow as a professional?