How I prepared for the 2022 - 2023 School Year?
How it started?
So beginning in late May or early June of 2022, I received my schedule for the next school year. I was informed that I would be teaching five co-taught biology courses and one forensic science course. At first I was slightly disappointed by the schedule and how it would affect my milestone scores at the end of the school year. I normally have two co-taught classes, however this year I have every co-taught biology course in the school. Before the school year even began, I knew that I was going to have my year cut out for me.
The planning?
My school does a four by eight block schedule which by itself is detrimental to students in End of Course classes because students have to remember concepts and topics covered during August, in May. I decided to reach out to my new co-teachers to see if they would like to plan during the summer months to make the school year flow smoother, however the school was still working on hiring someone for the position. I figured no worries and began working on a new curriculum for my biology students. For this school year I wanted to try a teaching strategy that was used by my mentor teacher during my student teaching days. I decided I was going to plan my lessons and activities around the premise of an Interactive Notebook. During the COVID year(s), I used a digital Interactive Notebook, but since we were fully back in school I wanted to use a physical composition book for students to store their notes and classroom activities in.
The goal was to develop an entire biology curriculum that students could learn biological concepts and topics at their own pace by watching videos that I made that covered the notes and activities. I knew it was going to be a lot of work, however I had plenty of time to lay the foundation. So I called one of my fellow biology teachers and asked them what order we were going to teach biology for the 2022 – 2023 school year. They gave the sequence and I began developing the Unit 1 notebook. It took me three weeks to finish the Unit 1 notebook, but it was ready to go before the school year began. I figured that if I could make the other Units as the school year progressed. The videos that accompanied the lessons were recorded several times due to errors on my part, but I finally got the scripts down. I thought prior to the school year that if I have video lessons and students have the ability to move at that own pace, then that would allow my co-teacher and myself more time to help struggling students.
For my one forensic class, a veteran teacher who has been teaching the course for years reached out to me and said that she would let me use her resources to help with developing lessons for the class. Forensic Science at my school is a senior level course so the expectations are different from my biology course which consists of 99% freshman and is a milestone course. Essentially my entire Forensic Science course’s curriculum was already created, however the only issue that I could run into was having too much extra time towards the end of the school year.
How did the school year go?
In all honesty, this school year went by almost extremely smoothly. The interactive notebook concept from my pre-planning period in June and July worked extremely well in helping keep students’ notes organized and be left behind in the classroom. The biggest knock that I had was that even though students could have moved through the curriculum on their own, only two of them did. All the other students waited until class to complete lessons and/or activities. At the beginning of the school year, we told the students to complete the notes on their own and then complete the activities and labs once they finish the notes. My co-teacher and I really tried to make the classroom autonomous, however the students almost refused to complete tasks on their own. When I polled the class on why they did not want to do the work on their own, they said they do not learn that way. So I began playing the same videos that they would have watched on their own, in class to see if anything would change and it drastically did. The class went from not wanting to complete the assignments on their own to I was moving too slow. This biggest problem was I waited three weeks to switch to whole group learning so the majority of the class got behind. Towards the middle of the school year, the students said they preferred my Google slide notes/instructions over my video explanation of the same concepts. It was an interesting turn of events, however students were moving at their own pace which was my initial intention for the class.
The Biology Interactive Notebook initially consisted of notes, activities, and labs. However, I started realizing that the class was not going to be finished with the Interactive Notebook until May which does not work well in a milestone course that has a milestone date of May 2, 2023. So to fix this time crunch issue, I had to strap a lot of the activities and labs from the class and go note heavy to ensure that the entire Georgia Biology Standards were covered in class. As many of you know biology is a notes heavy course, however not knowing what concepts the students actually need on the Georgia Milestones make the notes take even longer because as a teacher, I want to be sure that every possible meaning of a vague standard is covered. I do feel I did a better job this school year of breaking down the Georgia Biology Standards and Elements.
Overall, I would rate my performance for this school year a B-. Even though I somehow won teacher of the year, I feel that I could have done so many things differently. I spent a lot of hours working on content and perfecting materials that could better help students, but many students did not use them.
What can I improve on?
I will have to design a more engaging curriculum again for the 2023 – 2024 school year. This upcoming school year I will be teaching a wide range of students again so I have to design a curriculum that will make students want to come to class and enjoy biology. I spoke with my instructional coach and they gave me sound advice on using manipulatives again for my classes. I often would design tasks that take up the entire class period, when I could have created simpler tasks that covered more than one biological concept in that same amount of time. In the past, I used plenty of manipulatives for various biological concepts that I will bring back for the 2023 – 2024 school year.
Milestone data for this school year was as expected based on the Lexile data from most of the students, however there are some areas that I could still improve on to help push some of my borderline students to the next level. One thing that is consistent when it comes to the Milestone data for students that are between the range of 63 – 67 is the lack of tutorial time before the milestone. I have to do a better job of getting students excited about standardized testing (I am being somewhat sarcastic). I offered 90 minute tutorial times on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for milestone prep, but after talking to students I believe if I reduced the time to 20 – 30 minutes milestone preparation tutorial, I would have had more students that needed the tutorial to attend.
As I think of more items to improve on, I will add them here, but I have a strong feeling that the art of storytelling will make its way into my preparations for the 2023 – 2024 preparations. Stay tuned.