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Andrew Moulton
SPED 505 Mallorca REACH Inventory Assessment
July 4, 2014
I like the Buddhist idea of beginners mind: regardless of how proficient you may become in a
given expertise, the beginning professional actively maintains the opinion that she does not know
everything, that she cannot know everything, and that when she engages with the same material,
she does it through fresh eyes each day. With this first year in the classroom, I feel I have been
constantly in a cycle of expression, evaluation, adaptation, and adjustment. I especially resonated
with REACHs Quality Indicator 1, These include an appreciation of students learning and
behavioral differences, a commitment to delivering quality instruction, and dedication to
continued professional growth and development (pg. 34), as they define for me what is essential
in being a responsive teaching professional.
Generally, I noticed that these techniques are aimed at helping teachers who are overwhelmed
with students and curriculum demands. Fortunately, at the Ecole dHumanite I am not expected
to work with more than twelve students in a class, and there are no curriculum demands since
class outcomes are mostly tangential to the overarching goals of social and familial integration.
I am certain that I have received a solid education through my undergraduate class work and
extracurricular experiences; I am aware of many of the factors contributing to an invigorating
reading and writing class for a wide array of readers and writers. However, since I am new to
naming what I do Differentiated, I was a bit surprised to be validated in my teaching techniques
considering that both my director (who called the class he observed unique) and my academic
dean were rather unimpressed with how I conducted class.
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I learned from taking the Inventory that I have a surprising amount of strengths. It also appears
that I have a well balanced approach to differentiated instruction. I am especially adept at being
reflective, much of this stems from my meditation and yoga practices which cultivate a self
awareness, but it is also aided by being a foreigner and minority almost everywhere I go. I am
sensitive to unspoken contextual cues, and I listen and observe very, very well. I was not
surprised to find that I do not generally value or credit my strengths and instead focus upon
weaknesses challenges in this case.
The largest challenge I faced, as it is also expressed here in the Inventory, was continuity. The
Ecole administration appears to thrive on being reactionary to situations rather than proactive. I
was unable to access prior student work, current medical conditions and medications, essentially,
if I hadnt had a student previously, I would have to start building a student profile from scratch
and often in a students second or third language every ten weeks.
Another challenge I grappled with was assessment. I rarely formally tested my students since so
many had severe test anxiety. Complimenting my own doubts about the validity of standardized
testing, the school also did not encourage testing in other classes. I would informally assess the
student at the beginning of the term, take notes, and then track her progress, culminating in a
narrative evaluation that expressed the students growth, strengths, and areas of challenge,
ending with a suggestion for moving forward. I was not trained, nor am I aware of a variety of
summative assessments, I am not certain that they would be beneficial in this situation, but I am
interested in tracking student progress from term to term in a more formalized and useful
manner. I do feel that through writing assignments that investigate identity, home, and belonging
as well as conversation in and out of class, I come to intimately understand my students needs
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and desires, as well as their values, but I think some exposure to alternative summative testing
would be interesting to integrate into the narrative evaluation formats.
What performance goals would I develop about what I teach all students? I teach secondary
English literature and writing for a population of students for which English is not native. I
believe I am able to meet students where they are academically by selecting novels and writing
assignments that are ability appropriate rather than age appropriate. I have no pressure steering
my book selections from curriculum demands. I am however, interested in finding invigorating
novels that are both contemporary and abridged. There are many classics that are abridged, but I
find that new readers are not interested in nor are they ready for classic, old English novels.
Contemporary novels, even a classic contemporary novel such as Things Fall Apart, are not
available in simpler formats. I do like Byrons idea of having students who are encountering
trouble read key pages in a section and then having peers fill in the gaps through discussion or
game play. I could see this working very well with my group of students.
I have long been interested in diversifying my supplemental materials and assistive technologies
but just have not had the time to devote to it since my schedule was so tightly packed this first
year. I aim to engage learners on different intelligence levels but feel I come up short too often. I
am interested in checking out http://whatworks.ed.gov; http://cited.gov for new teaching ideas,
methodologies, strategies, and procedures.
I am aware of a dissonance between what I say and what students understand. This could be
cultural, or even have something to do with different expectations, but I would like to work on
fine tuning how I present verbal cues, and then developing overlapping or multilevel ones. This
past term I was especially aware of checking for clarity with a student who frequently
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misunderstood my cues. She was a complex young woman whose issues were carefully hidden
from me, but I know that in her history there were some depression symptoms, lack of respect,
and disregard for instruction that suggested to me some deep rooted trauma. I would have liked
to have had some of the information from this class prior to my start with her.
This past term I was also interested to see how sound lesson structure benefitted younger
students, for example ninth grade EFL. The educational philosophy at the Ecole, or at least the
way I understood it, was such that interest for learning stemmed from student interest - that class
should be organic rather than imposed. My class actually suggested that they wanted and needed
more imposition, stating that I knew what they needed and that I should just give it to them
whether they liked it or not. It was interesting to hear and rather successful in its outcome. I
would like to experiment more with creating an underlying structure while still maintaining a
sense of spontaneity. In a general sense, lesson variety doesnt hurt either, and while I did note it
as a strength, pacing is something that I like to keep in mind for a quick fix to balancing the
needs of class on a given day. For example, if the class is lethargic, speeding up and varying
instruction, even getting students out of their chairs, to inject the class with some animation.