Student Learning Reimagined

MATC Synthesis Paper

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Master of Arts Degree in Curriculum and Teaching
Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University

Ashley A. Conrad
PID A39392493
August 7, 2015

I.

Introduction

As teachers, teaching-imparting knowledge, leading by example, inspiring inquiry, challenging

students to stretch what they believe themselves capable of-is very powerful, it is easy to lose
sight of them. So many responsibilities other than those listed above press in on
teachers every day. In the midst of meetings, emails, paperwork, standardized testing,
evaluation stresses, school-wide initiatives, and politics, it is easy for teachers to become
buried and disconnected from what drew them to teaching in the first place: the
students. Unfortunately, when teachers are drawn away from the central goal of helping
students to learn, they often become disillusioned with teaching and sometimes even
leave the profession.
The journey through the Masters of Arts in Teaching and Curriculum (MATC)
program as well as my classroom experiences during the same time really allowed me to
hone in on this truth: teaching is about loving kids and helping them learn. My MATC
experiences not only helped me to focus in on the centrality of helping students learn,
but it also expanded my knowledge of how I could do this both in my own classroom and
in the broader context of education. My journey is really broken up into two parts: one
that focuses on new ways to help students learn within a classroom context through new
instructional techniques and resources and one that focuses on ways to make education
as a whole better so that students will have better opportunities to learn.

II.

Improving Instruction to Students

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When I began teaching in my current district, one of the big pushes was to make an effort to
reach every student every day. While I think this is a fantastic goal, I am not sure at the time I heard
it that I was really equipped to reach all of my students effectively. As a student, I had been a very high
achiever, and I strived to be, as a teacher, the kind of teacher I would have wanted as a student.
Unfortunately I was teaching to a room full of students where only a few were like me, and I had very
little conception about the way to reach each one both in terms of support and interest.
At the end of my first year teaching middle school French, one of the high school French
teachers mentioned that she used a strategy with her students called TPRS (Teaching Proficiency
through Reading and Storytelling). She said that it was extremely effective at engaging students as well
as increasing their listening comprehension and speaking skills. She described the technique as telling
students stories in the target language with their input. I was really interested in this teaching method
as a way to reach all of my students and to improve listening and speaking skills, because these were
two areas in my teaching I felt needed improvement (Standard 3). When I took TE 808: Inquiry in
Classroom Teaching and Learning in the fall of 2013 and needed to do an action research project
(Artifact 1), I decided to focus on the TPRS method for teaching world language.
In addition to the challenges this project brought, I was at a very difficult time in my teaching. I
had been given two new courses to teach: French II and Ancient Civilizations as well as French I,
which I only had one years experience teaching. To add to the challenge, my school day was split
between two different middle school buildings and all but about fifteen minutes of my prep time each
day was spent traveling between schools. I was spending extremely long hours at school as I worked to
create lessons for all three classes. I was definitely focused primarily on survival and were it not for
my masters courses during that year, I probably would not have expanded out my strategies for
teaching.

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So because I had a new level of French to teach, I decided it should be the focus of my action
research project (Artifact 1) on TPRS. More so than the level one students, level two students needed
to work on the narrative mode of expression and TPRS fit with that ideal quite well. My initial research
on TRPS for the literary review portion of my research project presented very encouraging research
with both student improvement and positive student reception to the TPRS method. My original goal
for my action research project had been to measure an increase in the proficiency of students
presentational speaking abilities with regards to narratives as well as student perceptions of the
teaching method. Because I was in my first year of teaching French II, I was unable to sufficiently
organize class time to do the number of TPRS stories necessary to see significant growth in students,
so I instead focused solely on student perceptions of the method. Using student surveys, I was able to
see that my students overall had really positive experiences with the TPRS method and wanted to do
more of it (Standard 4). While I did not end up doing many more TRPS stories with my level two
students due to time constraints, I did end up attending a three day workshop on the method in the
summer of 2014 and have been slowly expanding my use of this method in both my French I and
French II courses since. This method, along with its broader proficiency and comprehensible inputbased philosophies, has allowed me the opportunity to transform my French instruction and
dramatically increase the interpersonal speaking abilities of my students (Standard 2, Goal 2).
Alongside French II, my other new course to teach for the 2013-2014 school year was Ancient
Civilizations. Ancient Civilizations is the required seventh grade social studies course for the state of
Michigan. While I did have experience teaching World History, it had been Advanced Placement World
History at the high school level, and I had no idea how to teach social studies to middle schoolers.
When I asked advice of one of my colleagues, I was told that the major focus of the course should be
on reading and getting students to the point where they could read basic primary and secondary sources
for comprehension. For me teaching content-area literacy effectively was a definite problem of practice
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(Standard 4). I had never had to work with students on literacy skills prior to teaching this class, so I
was very grateful to be taking TE 846: Accommodating Differences in Literacy Learners in the spring
of 2014. This course was exceptionally helpful in coming to understand the actual intellectual process
of reading with all of its complexity. Being given some strategies to help struggling readers was
invaluable.
As part of the course, I was asked to complete a literacy case study (Artifact 2). For this study, I
focused on helping one of the lowest readers in my class. I had all students fill out a reading attitude
survey to assess their feelings about reading in general and a reading strategies survey to see if students
knew and used specific strategies when confronted with a challenging text. Using the survey data as
well as current class grades, I determined that this student would be an excellent choice to work with.
While my work for my case study focused on one student, the survey result gave me a better
understanding of the struggles and needs of each student within the course (Standard 1).
Using course assignments to measure progress, I met with her after school in individual
tutoring sessions that focused on vocabulary and comprehension strategies. Strategies and methods
used for teach tutoring sessions were those that I learning from my course readings in TE 846 and from
my own additional research (Standard 3, Goal 1). This student improved only slightly in her reading
comprehension I believe due in part to her limited availability for after school sessions and the
disparity between her reading level and the reading level necessary for the course work. One important
thing that I learned from this case study was that students perceptions of their ability are not always
accurate. This student would read a passage and claim that she understood it, but would not be able to
answer even simple questions about its meaning or vocabulary. I think that this student inaccurate
perception of her ability to comprehend texts was very limiting for her, as she would not see that she
was struggling and implement a reading strategy to help her along. Knowing this about students
challenges me to go deeper with them to really see if they truly understand what I am trying to teach
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them. This knowledge motivates me to make my students more aware of their own comprehension
levels by doing frequent checks for understanding. I am also more thoughtful about student reading
struggles and how best to support them when I am creating reading assignments (Standards 2 & 4,
Goal 2).
After completing TE 846 in the spring of 2014, I decided to take the summer off and, due to
some health challenges, did not end up taking another masters course until the spring of 2015. In spite
of significant challenges presented by what ended up being some very nasty side effects to a
medication I was taking, my school year went very well. I did not teach Ancient Civilizations, so I had
one less class to prepare for and I had already taught both French I and French II, so I was able to do
more re-creating and refining than creating from scratch. I was able to reduce my hours at school from
about eighty during the 2013-2014 school year down to about sixty during the 2014-2015 school year.
While my number of hours was still very high, I was very much encouraged by the progress I was able
to make in spending a little less time at work. To me this connects directly to Goal 2: Accomplished
teaching, as I have come to learn that being a truly accomplished teacher requires a very healthy worklife balance. It is simply not possible to be ones most effective at helping students to learn when every
waking hour is focused on teaching.
Because I was teaching classes that I had taught before and had now been in the district for two
years, I was finally able to feel comfortable with my teaching persona. Less overwhelmed by learning
new curriculum, I was able to better get to know and enjoy my students (Standard 1). Parents became
more comfortable with me, and I was much more adept at addressing their concerns. Overall, it was a
much more comfortable year that the previous two had been. In spite of this, I did decide that the
struggle of taking masters courses while teaching sixty hours each week was really more than I wanted
to take on for the 2015-2016 school year. I also found out that my schedule was going back up to three

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preps while continuing to remain in two buildings. In order to complete my masters classes while not
teaching, I decided to complete my masters courses during the summer of 2015.
In the summer of 2015, I took three courses in educational technology that were extremely
helpful in looking to technology to both enhance instruction and to support struggling learners. Having
discovered that my district was going to be going one-to-one with iPads and feeling very unprepared
for this change, I decided to enroll in CEP 810: Teaching Understanding with Technology. As part of
this course, I was able to see how technology can serve to enhance student learning instead of simply
becoming a side show in the classroom. The course also helped me to examine how technology is
changing what students need to know and be taught as part of their schooling. Unprepared to meet the
21st century learning needs of my students and unsure what those needs were, I began examining
different views of skills students will need for our modern world (Standard 3, Goal 1). With this in
mind, I was asked to use a technology that was new to me to create a lesson plan (Artifact 3) that
integrated in Hobbs' List of Core competencies as Fundamental Literacy Practices (Hobbs 2011). My
lesson (Artifact 3) worked with students analyzing primary sources, researching the authors, and
creating a Museum Box to represent their findings. While I have not had the opportunity to implement
this lesson in my Ancient Civilizations course, I am hoping to be able to use this lesson at least once in
each unit, focusing on a different set of primary sources and theme each time (Standard 2).
Because I so enjoyed CEP 810, I decided to continue the succession of educational technology
courses to receive an educational technology endorsement by taking CEP 811: Adapting Innovative
Technology to Education and CEP 812: Applying Educational Technology to Problems of Practice.
Both classes have been extremely helpful in building on the work of CEP 810 to increase my
understanding of TPACK. TPACK is a methodology for implementing technology that works to create
a balance between technical knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and content knowledge. Instead of
placing technology at the center of a lesson, it focuses on balance and overlap of these three types of
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knowledge. TPACK states that it is in the overlap of all three types of knowledge that effective lessons
happen (Koehler, n.d.).
These educational technology courses also required that I learn a new form of written
expression: blogging. Over the course of these three classes, I have become much more adept at blogstyled writing embedded within a vivid array of media enhancements (Standard 5). I have used my
new blogging skills to create a summer enrichment program for my French students where they
maintain their use of French by postings blogs in French about their summers (Standard 2, Goal 2). I
am also hoping to incorporate student blogs into my French I and II courses during the year to give
students more authentic opportunities to practice their presentational (writing the blogs) and
interpersonal (commenting on the blogs of others and responding to others comments on their blogs)
writing skills.
CEP 812 was wholly focused on problems of practice and using technology to help solve these
problems of practice. Over the course of the semester, we looked at a wide array of both problems of
practice and even extremely complex ones dealing with ways in which education must evolve to better
meet our societys current needs. One of the problems of practice we examined was supporting
students with different learning challenges. One of my assignments (Artifact 4) asked me to do
research into a specific learning challenge and then find a specific technology that could help to
support students with this learning challenge. I chose to look at students who were English Language
Learners (ELLs) as my group with specific learning challenges and discovered Notability, a fantastic
app with a numerous features that can effectively support the learning challenges of ELLs. By working
on this blog post, I received much deeper insight into how to support ELLs in my classroom and how
to use apps like Notability to support students in ways that were previously impossible (Standards 1 &
2). Since I teach a number of ELL students each year, I am looking forward to using this new
technology to better support my students (Goal 2).
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At the heart of student learning is instruction. Through all of the courses and assignments listed
above, I have been challenged to expand my repertoire of instructional strategies, I have been given
new insight into how to better support students with a variety of learning challenges, I have been
inspired to see technology as an ally instead of a hindrance when teaching students, and I have been
stretched to design lessons equipping students with the skills they will need for their future world.

III.

Improving Learning with Broader Perspectives

After I took TE 846, my next masters class, TE 818: Curriculum in its Social Context was

taken in the spring of 2015 and this is when I began to see how decisions made at the school or district
level could have a major impact on student learning. I had already had some opportunities to step
outside of my classroom to work on a French I curriculum project that was produced by Oakland
Schools from the summer of 2014 through the spring of 2015. For this project, I had the opportunity to
work with five other French teachers from across Oakland County to create a French I curriculum that
could serve as a resource for all districts within the county (Standard 6, Goal 3). I am happy to have
been given the opportunity to continue this work with the creation of a French II curriculum which
began this summer and will continue throughout the school year. This opportunity helped me to see the
impact that I could have in creating curriculum not only within my own classroom but across the entire
county.
TE 818 stretched my thinking on this even further by pushing me to broaden my perspective
from my classroom or even my teaching subject to education as a whole. In this course, I read On
Education by Harry Brighouse and was challenged to see the purpose of education as more than
merely a ticket of a job or college or a way to shape good citizens; to see the purpose of education
instead as allowing for individuals to flourish in the long term. After reading Brighouse as well as
several authors, I was challenged to write a paper (Artifact 5) explaining my views on what the goals
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of education should be. Through my reading, I was able to see that when the goals of education used to
create curriculum are too short-sighted, students are effectively learning, but what they are learning is
not as purposeful as it could be. After all, it seems rather short sighted to educated an individual into a
successful CEO position, but not teach him how to manage his own money or navigate relationships
with others or help him to identify who he is as a person (Standard 3).
Through my reading, I was able to argue that the best central focus for education is student
flourishing, which can help balance out the competing interests of social mobility, social efficiency,
and democratic equality. I realized that diverse student learning needs necessitated a central education
goal that was flexible enough to meet the needs of individual students while being consistent enough to
meet societys demands for the next generation (Standard 1, Goal 1). As part of my paper, I offered a
number of concrete suggestions on how schools and teachers could implement programs to reflect
these more holistic goals (Standard 6, Goal 3).
Another assignment for this course challenged me to think about accountability in schools.
After reading Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right by Richard Rothstein, Rebecca
Jacobsen, and Tamara Wilder, I was challenged with the task of writing a paper (Artifact 6) to present
my proposal for how schools should be held accountable and for what. Part of the challenge was to
consider how to hold schools accountable for the intangible factors that are critical to creating a
positive learning environment like the relationships between teachers and students and to what extent
demonstrate and are encouraged to demonstrate things like kindness, honesty, responsibility, and
determination (Standard 3, Goal 1). By examining the current system of accountability for schools and
the potential for what school accountability could look like, I was definitely encouraged that the having
a positive impact of student learning is in no way limited to the classroom.

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In my proposal, I argued that we first need to establish what goals should be measured instead
of which goals can be most easily measured. I advocated for the use of quantitative data only as
supported by qualitative data. In order to collect such qualitative data, I insisted on the presence of
school inspectors to assess things like school culture, classroom environment, and the implementation
of effective teaching practices. Having gone through the process of writing this paper, I feel much
more qualified to engage un intelligent public policy and district decisions and debates on how we
evaluate our schools and teachers (Standard 6, Goal 3). Getting accountability right will allow schools
to focus less on test scores and more on creating effective environments for learning which, in the end,
should dramatically improve the learning experiences of students.
At the beginning of the summer, the ideas taught in TE 818 about students learning needing to
be more holistic was reinforced by a trip I took with students to Qubec. Because I was very interested
in taking my French students to Qubec, I was very kindly invited to serve as a chaperone with another
teacher on a trip with her students. On the trip we took thirty-nine eighth graders on a four-day trip to
Qubec City and Montreal. It was amazing to see the growth in these students. Not only did their
French improve, but they were more confident, independent, comfortable with who they were. Seeing
this transformation in these students drove home how much more students need to learn than just basic
academic subjects in a classroom. In unquestionably convinced me that we need to be doing far more
for our students than we are currently doing. It is my hope that in planning these sorts of experiences
for my own students, I will be able to foster their growth in much broader ways that I have done in the
past (Standards 2 & 4, Goal 2).
This summer in CEP 810, I was once again asked to think about improving student by looking
outside the classroom with the task of thinking about my own professional learning network (PLN). In
order to be better classroom teachers, teachers need to be able to continually learn and grow both from
their own self-reflection and from collaboration with others. In my blog post (Artifact 7), I realized that
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my own professional learning network was quite limited, and that is desperately needed to be expanded
(Standard 3). I am currently the only teacher teaching French in both of my buildings and am given
only limited collaboration time with other French teachers in the district. In addition, my travel
schedule is such that I am unable to attend many of the staff meeting/professional development
meetings held in either building. I have been able to create a fantastic network of teachers through my
curriculum work at Oakland Schools, but this is simply not enough. In order to expand my PLN, I was
encouraged to look to digital sources that would not require obstacles like days off of school or hefty
participation fees. I discovered that both twitter and an RSS reader to follow what other teachers are
doing and creating. I have both sources of information to be invaluable and plan to not only continue to
use them but encourage colleagues to do so as well (Standard 6, Goal 3). When teachers are given
opportunities to learn and grow students receive more effective teachers and better opportunities to
learn. While I cannot seem to easily connect with teachers in my district, it is really incredible to be
granted virtual entrance into the classrooms of teachers from around the entire country.
My last course as part of my MATC was TE 872: Teachers as Teacher Leaders, where I have
been challenged to examine teachers almost separate from students. Better teachers, after all, leads to
better learning opportunities for students, so the focus has been on creating better teachers, supporting
teachers so that they can learn and grow, and decreasing attrition rates within teaching to increase
stability and allow students more opportunities to learn from experienced practitioners. As part of this
learning, I have examined and written a paper (Artifact 8) on the challenges faced by new teachers. As
a teacher going into my fourth year in my current position, I finally feel that I have moved out of the
induction phase of teaching and might be capable of helping others who are new to the profession.
After looking at all of the challenges facing new teachers and having a better idea of the emotional
phases new teachers experience throughout the year, I feel much more empowered to reach out to
newer teachers to offer them understanding and to help them improve their practice through
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collaboration and reflection (Standards 3 & 6, Goal 3). As the new school year begins, I will definitely
be more aware of the challenges facing our novice teachers and will look for ways, both individually
and institutionally, to better support them.
IV.

Conclusion
Teaching is such a challenging task: such a complicated blend of art and science. Teachers must

learn to connect with their students; teach all of their students, including those that need extra supports;
connecting with parents in meaningful ways that allow you to work together as a team to best support
the success of individual students; teach not just for the standardized tests, but to create adults who are
compassionate, responsible, functional, and capable of living fulfilling and productive lives; support
novice teachers who must learn how to teach while in the throes of actually teaching; allow students to
learn 21st century skills like creativity and critical thinking; integrate technology into lessons in ways
that enhance the learning of the content; writing curriculum to best support the long-term needs of
students; and advocating for new programs to improve school culture, goals, and organization in order
to improve student learning. In fact, teaching requires doing all this while not forgetting such mundane
tasks as attendance, staff meetings, paperwork, and a never-ending flow of E-mails. While the
challenge of teaching is truly daunting, it is also incredibly fulfilling: making an impact in the lives of
students, teaching them character by example, showing them how they can use that they are learning to
make the world a better place. It is the reward of teaching that makes is worth the challenges.
Teaching is something that cannot be done well by someone unwilling to learn. There is no
perfect teacher, no perfect teaching method. It is only through continuous learning and experimenting
that teachers are able to grow and become better than they were previously. I feel that the journey of
this masters program has provided me with the opportunities to move from being a novice teacher,
unsure about myself and not only unaware of how to help my students, but often unaware that they
even needed my help to someone who is comfortable with who she is as a teacher and possessing a
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new understanding of how to reach out to my students and an infinitely greater set of tools and ideas
for helping them.

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References
Brighouse, H. (2006). On Education . New York: Routledge.
Hobbs, R. (2011). Digital and media literacy: Connecting culture and classroom. Thousand, Oaks, CA:
Corwin/Sage.
Museum box. [Website/ Online software]. Retrieved from http://museumbox.e2bn.org/
Ginger Labs. (2014). Notability. [Software]. Retrieved from http://www.gingerlabs.com/
Rothstein, R., Jacobsen, R., & Wilder, T. (2008). Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right.
New York: Teachers College Press.
Koehler, M. (n.d.). TPACK.org. Retrieved from http://tpack.org/

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