Reflection on Professional Development Days at Northern Hills Middle School and the Presentation by Sir Ken Robinson I had

the opportunity to attend two Professional Development meetings at Northern Hills Middle. At first, I was a little skeptical as to what could possibly go on in these meetings that would be helpful to me as a Teacher Assistant, but I soon found that there was a lot to be learned about the teaching profession that I had not been aware of. Because I started my teaching degree while the Common Core State Standards were in the process of being written, and the math standards have since been released, they have been the standards that I have worked the most with when learning how to write lesson plans. I went into Northern Hills thinking that the Common Core were the standards being used to write lesson plans already. The first Professional Development day taught me otherwise. While the seventh grade math department has moved to the Common Core, many of the teachers in the wide assortment of content areas were unaware of the degree of literacy that is expected in the Common Core standards. Because of the education I have receive thus far in the College of Education at Grand Valley, I was under the impression that the idea of developing literacy within each content area was well under way in schools. I was surprised by the number of teachers who were still thinking with the misconception that literacy means being able to read and write. As the principal walked through the importance of bringing deeper literacy into the schools and teachers were asked to discuss in groups what that means for their classrooms, many responded that they needed better modeling of this practice. Some teachers even asked, Who is going to tell us which texts we need to have students read? The discussion regarding the importance of literacy sounded a lot like the discussions I have had in my Content Literacy course. However, the response to this discussion was very different from the response my peers and I had. Following the first Professional Development day, Paige and I discussed what we had heard and compared what we thought about the discussion with what we heard the teachers say about the discussion. Then, we started to think how we could start to make some subtle shifts in our classroom, specifically, how could we start making subtle shifts in how we teach mathematics. We talked a lot about what it means to be literate in math and what are some important things mathematicians need to be able to read. The most obvious answer, at least to the two of us, is graphs. Teaching students how to read graphs effectively could be an important subtle shift we make as we move into using the Common Core standards. As Paige and I continued in our placement this semester, we started to think about, what other important ideas in mathematics could use a subtle shift. We started to think about introducing proofs at a much earlier point in students' learning. The ability to argue an answer with a logical proof is an important piece of being literate in mathematics and we decided that the basic idea of proofs could be taught much sooner than when they are actually taught now.

I also had the opportunity to attend the talk given by Sir Ken Robinson at Grand Valley this semester. After the talk, Desiree and I both commented that we could have listened to him speak for another two hours. We were surprised when he finished! Desiree and I were able to discuss with each the main ideas we were going to take away from that night and realized that a lot of what he said were ideas we were already thinking about after observing our classrooms. Paige and I also discussed the talk, even though Paige could not attend the event. It helped me to solidify ideas in mind by explaining them to Paige, who tuned into Twitter that night since she knew that Dave would be tweeting about the topics. Paige and I talked specifically about how we could apply some of the idea regarding creativity in a unit plan we thought about creating. In our unit plan for Systems of Equations, the main idea we took from Sir Ken is the idea that content should not be so choppy and disjointed. We had noticed a disconnection when the unit on Systems of Equations was taught in our classroom, so we decided we wanted to write a unit that was purposefully connected all throughout. Every piece of the unit connects to another piece which connects to another which connects back to the first piece. While Sir Ken pointed out that all subjects should be less disjointed from one another, and we agree with that idea, we discussed that a major change like that would be extremely difficult to accomplish right away. Our compromise was by starting out in an area that we, as simple teachers, could control could start the change or in other words, we wanted to start by making a subtle shift in how we plan our units.